


I stole a pound of soap and pennies, Dressed by knives in crimson, black and blue

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Captivity, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, Developing Friendships, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship/Love, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 11:24:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19106134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: Cautiously, Steve puts his hand on Clint’s neck, lightly enough to be shaken off, close enough to feel the shift of his spinal cord under his palm and between his fingers and thumb. The magnitude of his trust feels like a chasm stretched out beneath them, and the freefall of accepting it leaves Steve breathless.It would take nothing, absolutely nothing, for Steve to break Clint’s neck like this. One squeeze, and he would drop like a torn sack of barley.“You’re really bad at hugging, Cap,” Clint says, and Steve laughs, deep in his chest.





	I stole a pound of soap and pennies, Dressed by knives in crimson, black and blue

**Author's Note:**

> Friends,
> 
> I'm astounded by the response for the first fic in this series - **thank you so much** \- fair warning it's sort of a downward slope at this point.
> 
> This will probably make sense without reading the previous story, but I do suggest you read that one first anyway, because this one has some nasty moments that might blindside you otherwise, which are implied or referenced at least in the first story.
> 
> Sorry.
> 
> Kudos & comments are always a delight.
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

 

*

Steve has this dream, sometimes. These dreams.

They are a plague.

*

The army wasn’t exactly big on therapy, back in Steve’s time. There were a lot of questions that maybe should have been asked, or answered, before he opened up his veins to superhero serum and jetted off to Europe with a line of stars and stripes trailing behind him.

There were things he hadn’t been prepared for, hadn’t ever really thought about, and loathe as Steve is to think ill of the men and women who helped him become the man he is, he rather thinks _they_ didn’t think about the consequences of their meddling, either.

Two months after he’s cracked out of the ice bed he’d made and laid in sixty-six years previous, Steve intervenes when he sees two guys mugging a young woman in an empty street.

It’s late, almost midnight. The city is as loud and desolate as it is at midday.

Steve doesn’t sleep much, and luckily, he doesn’t need to, but the truth is, he _wants_ to, all the same.

The world rarely gives people what it wants, though, and so at close to midnight on a particular Thursday, Steve is walking along the skid-slope of downtown when he hears the broken sounds of a struggle.

It’s over quickly. The men are greedy and untrained, perhaps not even sober, and the woman scrambles out from their grasp as soon as Steve has yanked them up and away from her, gasping and choking as she regains her footing and breath.

It’s over quickly, the way her face glows with a myriad fleeting emotions, her fear turned to relief turned to gratitude turned to horror.

“What the hell?” she says, coughing and clutching her bag as a bruise blooms on her chin and her tears sparkle in the orange glow of a nearby street lamp.

Steve turns to see what she’s looking at.

One of the muggers is pelting away, his breaths loud and ragged even from the distance he’s gained already, staggering. His limbs are frantic, and he stumbles twice without stopping, speeding out of sight.

The other, the one Steve had punched twice into submission as he brandished a short penknife, is lying on the ground.

His cheekbone has caved inwards, blood pooling in his shattered orbital socket, and his jaw looks dislocated.

For one disoriented moment Steve thinks, _How did that happen?_

He looks down at the splatters of blood on the knuckles of his own right hand.

The woman takes a step back from him, terrified.

“I – are you alright?” Steve tries to ask, can’t deny the sick swoop of his guts when she flinches away from him, from his outstretched hand wearing the splatters of her attacker’s blood.

“Th –” she tries, but she’s overcome with a sob and then she, too, is running, as fast as she can, the heels of her boots loud on the sidewalk, her dark hair whipping behind her as if caught in a gale.

Steve stands, paralysed by a terrible mixture of fear and confusion, as if he is staring out at the world through a thick pane of glass. Or a sheet of ice.

At his feet, the man’s breathing is laboured but mercifully steady. He can taste the ocean in the back of his throat.

Steve stands there, holding his breath, his eyes stinging and his stomach churning, and he might have stood there all night, not knowing what to do.

Only, a reeded voice breaks the silence.

“Captain Rogers?”

Steve flinches, looks to his right to see a man standing several metres away.

He hadn’t even heard his approach.

“Who –”

“My name is Agent Sanders,” the man says in the same calm, friendly tone with which he’d addressed Steve.

His hands are loose, unthreatening by his sides. He appears utterly undisturbed by the sight before him.

Steve recognises him, recognises him from a big room, a chatterbox room. Rows of seats and a lunch queue and eager glances over shoulders to catch sight of the man frozen in time –

“Fury sent you,” Steve says, without particularly comprehending his own realisation. He’s numb, and he’s _cold,_ and he’s got a stranger’s blood on his knuckles.

“We’ve been keeping an eye out for you,” Agent Sanders says, and Steve swallows the overwhelming urge to ask, _Don’t you mean on me?_

He just nods, letting go of his painful breath, and cold air rushes into his lungs. There’s no judgement in Agent Sanders’ eyes, no fear and no admiration. He’s a blank slate of a man, tall with salt sprinkles in his hair and a nicely trimmed beard.

Hazel eyes, a dominant left hand, a weak right knee and a scar on his nose.

“My partner will sort this out,” Agent Sanders says, although there’s no visible sign of said partner. “Let me walk you home, Captain.”

Steve looks down at the man on the floor, who still hasn’t come around.

Has it been long enough to worry about that? Steve has absolutely no idea.

“He’s –”

“He’ll be OK,” Agent Sanders says with such brutal dismissal. “So will the girl.”

Steve might believe it if it weren’t for the fact he’d been using that same tone of voice before this man was born. It’s a leader’s voice, a caretaker’s voice; an _I’ll fix it_ voice that really means _This is your mess but you can’t handle it so I will._

He’d used it on Bucky, once. Christmas Eve, 1943. His stomach clenches at the memory, and so do his hands, smeared with violence he hadn’t intended, but had happened anyway. His body is a weapon that not even he knows how to wield, sometimes.

“Just come with me,” Agent Sanders says.

And Steve, Lord forgive him, he does. He looks away from the bloodied face dented to the shape of his wrath and he walks down the street next to Agent Sanders, away from the chaos of his own pitiful making.

*

Steve has these dreams, sometimes.

About before. About all the things he gained and lost, and all the things he didn’t.

About the time he took hold of Bucky’s hand and let himself be pulled up from the ground; and the time Bucky slipped through his fingers.

About the way Peggy Carter looked with her guard down, the tiny flecks of green in her eyes that nobody else saw.

About the way he once shoved Jacques too hard in teasing jest, by accident; how Jacques hit the ground so hard he had bruises for a week.

*

He walks into SHIELD’s Medical Centre the following day, to Doctor Halliday with the side fringe and the no-nonsense eyes.

“We’ll find you someone, Steve,” Doctor Halliday says, says it with the sort of confidence that is probably, quite possibly, Steve’s favourite trait in another human being, to know what they’re doing and to do it well. “What about Doctor Alma Ricci? She’s normally our go-to for new recruits. Does a lot of work with people seeing action for the first time. But I think she’d be good for you, too.”

Steve grits his teeth, looking down at his clean righthand knuckles, which bear no mark of their violence the night before. The blood had washed off so easy. Steve had vomited into the sink at the lie of his clean hands when he woke up this morning.

“Yeah,” he says now, reluctant and upset and determined, under Doctor Halliday’s straightforward scrutiny. “Sure. Whatever you think.”

*

 _You’re pretty young for a therapist, aren’t you?_ He says, and he tries to soften it but it comes out all jabbered and tense.

Doctor Alma Ricci just laughs, and when she tilts her head, her dark hair falls over her shoulder, revealing a splash of dyed bright green in the layers of brown.

 _You’re pretty young for a World War Two veteran, Captain,_ she replies coolly.

*

Doctor Alma Ricci’s already sitting at the side of his bed when he wakes up, bleary and cramping, after being left at the Potomac’s drowning water’s edge by none other than the Winter Soldier, who isn’t the Winter Soldier at all.

She looks incredibly different outside of her SHIELD office, which he supposes isn’t her office anymore, because SHIELD doesn’t have any offices.

He thinks about telling her to leave. He thinks about asking her if she’s HYDRA. He thinks about telling her to go fuck herself.

They’re sitting in a bedroom that he momentarily doesn’t recognise.

Not until he sees the wall to his left, littered with puncture marks. The pine wood cabinet and matching wardrobe, a mount on the wall that he knows had at some point held a bow and quiver. He knows this place, has been in this apartment seven times, but only in this room once.

Bed-Stuy. He knows this place, knows it well enough, but what he doesn’t know, what he can’t even picture, is how he got here.

For a moment, Steve panics.

Then, before he can react, through the open crack of the door Steve realises he can see an incredibly familiar outline; a broad pair of shoulders and a splash of dark blond hair.

And he knows without a doubt there’s no need to tell Alma to leave, or to go fuck herself.  He knows she’s not HYDRA. He’s not alone in here, there’s a hawk standing sentry, and if Clint’s here, then so is Natasha.

So instead, he lets his body sink deeper into the bed he’s woken up in, weight pressing into his elbows, pressure in his shoulders keeping him upright.

He looks at Alma again, looks and sees her hands clasped over her knee, as usual, and instead of the lonely pink tourmaline around her left ring finger, there’s a second band of white gold gleaming in the fluorescent light. It makes him smile weakly, hopefully.

“Congratulations,” he says, and Alma starts, alarmed, clearly worried about disorientation or delirium.

When he nods slowly at her left hand, she looks down and smiles, a little surprised, as if she’d forgotten it was there.

“We thought it was about time,” she says, and fixes him with a look. “I hear there’s a lot of that going around these parts.”

“Guess you’re out of a job, Alma,” he tells her.

He looks for the green in her hair, but it’s hidden, kept secret, today.

Alma shrugs, looking surprisingly calm for someone who’s just found out the organisation she works for has been infiltrated by terrorists.

“There are plenty of people who need guidance in this world,” she says simply. “People like you and I will never truly be out of a job, Steven.”

Steve laughs at that, a little delirious, a little relieved, and is surprised by the spiny lump in his throat that blocks any reply he might have to offer.

She’s right, after all.

*

Nine hundred and eighty-five days later, Steve wakes up in another bed, in another room, and it’s a lot like that moment with Alma, when the stillness is absolute, and he might disappear into oblivion.

Waking up from almost seven decades of unsleep had been as disorienting as a Sunday afternoon snooze, in a way. It was only later that it came back to him, the terror, and the cold.

It’s a lot like that, nine hundred and eighty-five days later.

*

Although, a lot happens in those nine-hundred-and-eighty-five days. Important things. Good things.

Things worth mentioning, worth remembering.

Steve’s never been much of a numbers guy, but he knows that sometimes, it’s important to keep count. It’s important to remember, and to be reminded.

*

There are twenty-four thousand and seven hundred days between Steve Rogers crashing into the coast of Greenland and being dragged back out of it by greedy, self-congratulatory hands.

There are twenty-five thousand, five hundred and forty-nine days between Bucky Barnes’ hand slipping out of Steve’s grasp and his bright blue eyes piercing through a veil of false anonymity as they sink into the Potomac River.

There are twenty-six thousand, seven hundred and ninety days between the day Steve Rogers falls in love with Margaret Carter and the day he buries her.

*

There are two thousand, four hundred and fifteen days between Steve Rogers waking up in a brand-new world and that brand-new world turning to dust at the snap of a menacing finger.

There are one thousand, six hundred and fifty-six days between the day Steve Rogers meets Clint Barton and the day Steve Rogers loses him.

*

Clint Barton is the kind of man who makes Steve nervous.

He’s not the only one, of course.

Nick Fury makes Steve nervous, with his passive aggressive secret keeping and his pervasive ability to lie at all costs and ends, including his own. Thaddeus Ross makes Steve nervous, with his presumptive authoritative demeanour and the way he counts casualties like clicks when it suits him to.

Tony Stark regularly makes Steve downright anxious, with his paranoid melodrama and his assertively boundless cleverness.

The thing is, though, it’s a whole different kind of nervous with Clint.

Fury and Ross and Stark, they all look at Steve and they see something of their own making. Their symbol, their weapon, their father’s dinner table talk. They have expectations, often unreachable, and Steve reaches them anyway because that’s what he’s supposed to do.

Clint doesn’t seem to see any of that.

One day, Clint snorts his way through a press conference under his breath, and as they trail out of the room, mentally more exhausted than after ten rounds with an AIM Unit, he murmurs for nobody’s ears but Steve’s:

“Personally, I always thought you were overrated, Cap. I’d swap your trading cards for a Pikachu any day of the week. Actually, I think I _did_ swap you for a Squirtle, once. ‘Bout six years ago.”

 Steve bites down on the corners of his mouth and tries to throw Clint a reproachful look. Only, when he glances back over his shoulder, Clint’s wearing a blank expression of such total sincerity, it only makes it harder to keep his grin under control.

The next morning when Steve gets up, the Captain America mug on the Hero Tree in the kitchen has been replaced with one bearing a picture of a perky yellow creature with a lightning bolt tail and rosy cheeks.

Steve plucks it from its branch, and honestly, the fancy coffee grounds Tony imports from Brazil by the truckload have never tasted better.

It’s _easy_ with Clint, with that dangerous, trusting look of his.

The way he drops off buildings shouting _Stark, think fast!_ The way he scowls at Thor’s hold on Mjolnir and says _It’s a trick!_

The way he shrugs nonplussed when Bruce and Tony are on a Eureka spiral, but goes red around the ears when he gets caught muttering the correct equations under his breath at Tony while he’s monologuing.

And it’s Steve who catches him the most, of course, because he’s inevitably the one that’s listening.

What makes Steve nervous, soon enough, is when he realises that he may be listening to Clint, but Clint, he’s _watching_ Steve.

*

Clint watches Steve, calculating him like the angle of an arrow.

It’s Clint who makes a fuss, more often than not at the expense of his own dignity, when he spots Steve dropping over that dangerous precipice between _confusion_ and _panic._

*

Like the time Steve walks into the kitchen while Bruce is dishing up freshly made quesadillas because he’s fed up of takeout arguments, and the smell of coriander hits him hard and fast and without warning, sending him spinning down a tunnel of memory he didn’t know existed.

 _Smells like payday,_ Sarah Rogers used to say, the rare occasion when she’d be able to pick up fresh herbs from the market, wearing her proudest smile, never more pleased than when she was dropping a thimbleful of cilantro into her cooking pot.

Steve stands, caught in a maelstrom of coriander and the curiosity of his teammates hailing him over, and for a very brief moment his fists clench around air where there should be a shield, or a hand, or anything to hide from this drowning feeling of loss and longing. He stares at the quesadillas and can think of nothing he wants to do more than toss them straight out the window.

“Rogers, what are –” Tony says loudly, eyes giddy and mouth moving fast, and Steve doesn’t have anything to say, doesn’t have a single way out of whatever Tony is about to throw at him, other than the severe possibility he’s going to vomit all over his shoes.

“Steve –” Bruce is saying, and Natasha is cocking her head suspiciously, and Thor is beckoning him over, and Steve, Steve is definitely going to throw up any second now except –

“Aww, lemonade, _no!”_ Clint cries, in the exact moment he reaches for his glass and spills it all over the entire plate of quesadillas.

A dreadful silence descends over the table as they all take in the sight of the soaked dinner.

Tony, torn between absolute horror and absolute delight, puts his hand on Bruce’s shoulder and says,

“Banner, I know we’re mad, but this is not a Code Green.”

“It wasn’t my fault, guys,” Clint says despite all and total evidence to the contrary.

“Barton,” Bruce mutters, staring at his ruined food with forlorn hunger. “The Hulk will not be catching you off any more buildings for a _very_ long time.”

“Aww, Bruce, come on, I didn’t mean to!” Clint cries, prodding at one of the quesadilla quarters. They all wince as it squelches nastily. “Look, I’ll go out and get more. I’ll buy all the quesadillas in the city. Cap, you’ll come with me, right?”

“You are _not_ roping Steve into your apology quesadillas,” Natasha says, eyeballing Clint hard and with a familiar, unreadable look.

The smell is clinging to his nostrils, and Steve is completely satisfied with the idea of leaving this tower for at least thirty minutes.

“I don’t mind,” he says, as Clint’s face lights up and he scurries the long way around the table to avoid walking past Bruce. “It’s a Thursday. We’ll find somewhere easy enough, right?”

“How did he ruin every single one? You are the _worst,_ Barton!” Tony squawks at his retreating back.

Clint doesn’t pay attention to Tony, though. He’s too busy tugging Steve by the arm, thanking him loudly for being such a good teammate and how he’s grateful _someone_ values his friendship more than their dinner.

They’re chased out of the room by an entire string of various jeers and demands, as well as a few _You don’t have to, Steves,_ but Steve doesn’t respond.

He’s not even wholly aware of putting on his jacket and getting into the elevator. Barely notices Clint’s easily ignored, low level murmuring about how Bruce isn’t even all that good at cooking, doesn’t even know how to cook _ham,_ and maybe next time they’ll know better than to put all the quesadillas onto one plate, anyway.

It’s only once they’re out on the street below, the cool evening air slapping his face, that Steve takes a full breath and glances over at the man beside him.

Clint’s stopped talking, but the look of concentration is still there on his face as he stares straight ahead of them. His arms swing loosely by his sides, his entire posture relaxed. There’s nothing to suggest he’s thinking about anything other than food, and has been this whole time.

He doesn’t even react to Steve openly staring at the side of his face, other than to glance over once and offer him a one-sided smile.

Steve frowns a little, still counting the measure of his breaths as he walks.

“How did you –”

“I’ve got an idea,” Clint says. “We could go to that pancake place that does the homemade strawberry syrup.”

Steve snorts. His limbs feel heavy, and he thinks his hands might be shaking, so he stuffs them in his pockets to be safe.

“Thought we were buying quesadillas?”

Clint scoffs very loudly and pointedly.

“Please, you know Stark’s gonna have already ordered some more by the time we get back, probably from a Michelin star monstrosity. They’ll be fine without us. And let’s face it, quesadillas are just sad pancakes with vegetables.”

This is not the first time Steve has been struck by a wave of affection for the man currently walking beside him, half a pace slower than their usual gait, looking around like it’s for no other reason than to take in the scenery. Clint’s utterly at ease, keeping his eyes where Steve knows he’s in line of sight, but never directly in view.

Clint even pauses in the middle of the street to congratulate a woman on her beautiful chocolate coloured labrador, and proceeds to make very good friends with said labrador in a matter of seconds.

“Steve, this is Dexter. Say hi to Dexter, he’s a good boy – aren’t you? Aren’t you a good boy? Yes, I think you are, you are, Dexter, you’re so good.”

Clint’s crouched down, kissing Dexter’s face, while the woman blushes and grins and says,

“He’s four years old, but he thinks he’s still six months.”

Dexter wiggles excitedly, utterly thrilled with the doting attention he’s being afforded by this goofy stranger.

“He’s perfect,” Clint tells her. “Keep up the good work, boy,” he says, giving Dexter a thumbs up and a final pat, before impatiently pulling Steve down the street as if _he_ was the one holding them up. “Pancakes. Yeah? I’ve definitely seen you eat pancakes, Rogers, so speak now or forever hold your peace.”

They’re outside the door of the diner when Steve takes hold of Clint’s shoulder, forcing him to stop.

“Clint,” he says, pinching his shoulder too tight, but he can’t really seem to let go.

“Yeah, Steve?” Clint says, open and clear and so unassuming, doesn’t even seem to notice Steve’s close to bruising his shoulder in his overly tight grip.

Steve smiles a half-smile, like the one Clint had given him. Lets go with difficulty.

“Thank you,” he says.

Clint just ducks his head and shrugs, making a glib comment about strawberry syrup before pushing his way into the diner.

Steve follows.

*

It’s not the last time he does that.

*

In Istanbul, Black Widow leaves an emergency message in a safehouse.

The next day, Hawkeye interrupts Steve’s breakfast with an offer to help bring her back home.

Steve’s been getting good at recognising the difference between Clint and Hawkeye, these past few months.

Sometimes, the difference is night and day. Hawkeye, bow in hand, sitting absolutely still with his eyes on target for five hours straight; Clint, proving his Cirque du Soleil calling card by bouncing in one-hand handstands all over Tony’s lab while critiquing his arrow designs.

Oftentimes, it’s a subtle change. A coolness of his gaze, like the undisturbed surface of a calm lake. A quirk to his mouth that betrays a hidden burst of laughter unvoiced.

So, when Hawkeye interrupts his breakfast with his shoulders tense, his quiver strapped to his back and the words _I’m extracting Widow, want to come?_ Steve knows who’s asking, and more, what he’s asking, what he’s saying by offering.

 _(I trust you to have my back,_ he’s saying but more than that, he’s saying, _I trust you to have hers.)_

Steve nods once, drops his dishes in the sink and says, “How long do I have?”

“We’re out by oh-seven hundred,” Clint replies, his eyebrows raised. “Why I never – Captain America, leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Some national icon you’ve turned out to be.”

By the time Steve’s suited up and joined him in the jet, the last traces of Clint Barton are gone from his steely posture, his glass frost eyes. Steve knows _Clint_ won’t resurface until he has eyes on Widow. Later, if they run into trouble.

It had been alarming, the first time Steve went on a mission with them both, to discover that Black Widow and Hawkeye are rarely given extraction points or contingency plans when sent out into the field.

Until, of course, he realised. _They_ are each other’s extractions, the only contingencies they’ll trust, if all else fails.

It’s less and less, these days, that Steve’s thoughts get unwillingly drawn to Bucky, and the Howling Commandos, but it happens on occasion. Most often in moments like this, the sun ready to rise, night bleeding out of an indigo sky, in a quinjet next to someone he thinks, maybe, he can safely call a friend.

He lost his end of the line a long time ago, but he’s still here, still fighting, and if he’s going to survive this new and unforgiving world, he’s going to do it with this team of lunatics at his side.

“Does Fury know we’re off base?” Steve asks, twenty minutes into the sky, the sun peeping out from behind them.

Hawkeye tilts his head.

“You really should’ve thought of that before getting into the quinjet, Captain.”

Steve grins, shrugging easily.

“My out of office email’s on. Guess he’ll find out soon enough.”

Hawkeye’s smile is small, but there.

“I talked to Hill,” he says, which is surprising.

Steve likes Maria Hill a lot. She’s smart, sensible, and she’s got determination in spades.

It hasn’t escaped his notice, however, that she and Hawkeye are rarely found in the same room. Their interactions, that Steve has noticed, are cordial, professional, and technically Steve’s never actually _witnessed_ them not getting along with one another. It’s just, well. A feeling. A particular tension in the space between them, whenever they are standing close.

Steve’s never asked if that tension had existed when Phil Coulson was still alive.

Steve does his best not to ask about Phil Coulson at all.

*

Steve has these dreams, sometimes.

Nightmares.

He has nightmares.

*

He wakes up, once, a cautious hand on his elbow, and he jabs hard to the side in swift response, automatic, hard enough to break bones, and glass, and marble.

Clint catches his swing and brings it down smooth.

He says, grinning and blinking, “Steven Rogers, that’s no way to treat room service. I brought coffee and everything, man.”

*

There are one thousand, six hundred and fifty-six days between the day Steve Rogers meets Clint Barton and the day Steve Rogers loses him.

*

This is how the morning of day twenty-three begins.

*

Steve opens his eyes just in time to see the clock on his bedside cabinet tick into four am.

Stark’s all about the digital ones, of course, but surprisingly, Steve’s request for a normal analogue alarm clock was one of the few things Stark hadn’t considered fair game to judge him for.

It must be some kind of arbitrary system, Stark’s methods of choosing what it is he finds mockable as far as Captain Americanisms are concerned. Steve doesn’t ask, because he gets the impression that’s an invitation for Stark to up the ante.

He lies back starfish on the mattress, settled by the blanket of the dark. The ocean lingers in his memory, like the speeding rattle of a train.

He entertains the idea of going straight down to the gym for all of two seconds, before realising that would mean he was returning twice in the space of six hours.

While he might have a reputation to maintain, that feels closer to punishment than distraction, right now.

 _Take your time, Captain,_ Fury had said, two days ago at HQ.

The problem is, it feels a lot like all Steve has is time. What’s he supposed to do with it?

There’s no good place where these thoughts can drift to, so Steve makes a point of stopping them then and there. He rolls up to sitting, makes short work of remaking his bed and walks down the corridor towards the kitchen, zipping up a hooded jacket as he goes.

The lights in the communal areas of Stark’s tower are automatic, and they stay on a low level as Steve passes through them. He doesn’t know if that’s something JARVIS takes care of, but it seems like another thing Stark will only leap on, so he’s avoided asking too many questions about how JARVIS operates.

As he approaches the kitchen, he smells coffee and is surprised.

It’s rare, that Tony Stark is awake and not easily heard from a mile off.

However, when he gets to the doorway, Steve pauses in his tracks, surprised. It’s not Stark.

Natasha Romanov is standing in the middle of the room, sipping out of a mug that definitely wasn’t in the kitchen yesterday, declaring her _The Amazing Hawkeye_ in glittery indigo letters _._ In her other hand, she’s holding an enormous and incredibly fluffy looking donut.

It’s the first time he’s seen her since Loki got packed off to Asgard.

“Good morning,” she says, and Steve doesn’t know her all that well yet, but he thinks that’s uncharacteristic of her.

“Good morning,” he replies anyway, because it probably wouldn’t do for the Black Widow to be showing better manners than Captain America. That reputation won’t keep itself up, after all.

“Coffee’s fresh,” Natasha says, cool and collected, as if her appearance shouldn’t prompt so much as a second glance. She tilts her head back to the island behind her and says, “Donuts, too.”

“Jelly?” Steve asks as a reflex.

Natasha scoffs, looking insulted.

“Cream,” she replies, staring down Steve’s look of disbelief.

“Thanks,” he says with a narrow-eyed look of deep suspicion, helping himself to a cup and a donut. “Where’d you find fresh donuts at this hour?”

Natasha rolls her eyes, which Steve figures is her standard response to requests for her sources.

She hops up freehand onto the worktop without spilling her coffee, taking in Steve’s appearance as brashly as she had done before the Chitauri battle a few short weeks ago.

“Gentrification has its upsides,” she says in a closed-shop voice, taking another sip from her cup.

Steve gives the mug a pointed look, but she doesn’t take up the question and he doesn’t voice it.

“You here to stay?” he asks, taking a small bite of donut and refusing to groan in response, if only because it’s not _jelly,_ so it can’t be _that_ good. “The management leaves something to be desired, but I hear you’ve got experience.”

Natasha takes another bite of donut before replying.

“I was going to wait until my private quarters were fully furnished, but I can’t stay at SHIELD a second longer and I’d have to stock the fridges myself at a safehouse.”

Steve tips his head in acknowledgement at that.

Honestly, he’s a little intimidated by the veritable truckloads of goods that get delivered at surprisingly regular intervals to Stark Tower.

Even once the serum had left his metabolism needing more food per day than he used to get in a week during the Depression, it had hardly been quality produce. They’d been in a warzone, after all. How the protein supplements he’d needed to take _tasted_ had been pretty low on the army’s priorities.

Now, he opens the fridges and freezers in Stark’s apartments and feels a little sick at how much must risk going to waste, with only three of them eating with any regularity. Especially seeing as how Stark seems to sustain himself chewing coffee grounds most of the time.

Not even Ms Potts visits frequently enough to make a dent in the food.

Perhaps something of his thoughts shows on his face, or perhaps Natasha’s reputation is less smoke and mirrors than Steve had thought, because she continues, quite unprompted.

“JARVIS makes sure what’s left gets distributed to shelters before it can go bad,” she says, and it takes a moment for Steve to figure out what she means.

“Really?” he asks, and it’s not that he’s been making a conscious habit of underestimating Stark, but still. That’s more than he thought would cross the man’s radar.

Natasha nods, licking sugar from her thumb and clutching her mug with both hands though it’s mostly empty.

“Pepper still remembers what it’s like to think about money as a finite resource,” she says.

Of course. Steve nods. That makes more sense.

Turning around, Steve jumps lightly up to sit beside her. The island is just about tall enough that his legs hang loosely, his toes brushing the ground.

Natasha flashes him a rare smile that looks almost believable. She’s wearing a black SHIELD uniform, her dark red hair curling around her ears. It would seem she’s been up for a while, or perhaps simply hasn’t slept at all.

“Did something happen at HQ?” Steve asks.

He doesn’t much expect an answer. Natasha might be sharing coffee and donuts without any of her weapons showing, but that’s a far cry from ready to _chat._

She swings her legs, crossed at the ankles, her heels hitting the panels. When she looks at him, he looks back, and hopes he succeeds in projecting something closer to empathy than sympathy. For a moment, she seems to pull away. Her eyes are distant as clouds, and her mouth stays shut, lips pressing together as if to hold in her tongue.

Then, blinking, she looks forward instead, towards the huge window their position has them facing.

New York glitters in pre-dawn, its usual sleepless stasis.

“Maybe Tony will give me the penthouse if I tell him I want it,” she says, sounding thoughtful. “Pretty sure he’s still a little bit scared of me.”

“I think everyone’s a little bit scared of you,” Steve says, more of a show than a truth, and her mouth twitches in another nearly-smile.

“Not everyone,” she says, draining her cup.

Her nails are loud clicking over the cheap ceramic in a trill of taps.

“Is Tony really going to give us our own quarters?” Steve asks, staying up on the worktop while Natasha hops down silently and washes her cup in the sink.

The water from the tap must be scalding, heat rising up from the basin where it splashes, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

She throws him a look, catlike curiosity and amusement.

“What do you think all the renovations are for?” she asks. “You’re already staying here, aren’t you?”

Steve shrugs. He’s been taking his days by the hour, mostly. In a toss-up between SHIELD and Stark, Steve knows which one he feels safer in the hands of right now, even if it involves staying in a spare suite of a floor of a half-destroyed building.

And isn’t that the biggest surprise of all?

“Hadn’t really thought about it,” he admits.

He has a feeling he’s going to admit a lot to this woman, over time. She’s a magnet of trust, which probably makes her the least trustworthy person in this or any room.

And yet. Steve thinks about the way she’d caught Barton as he dropped unconscious in the street, a needle in his neck and tears on his face. Easily, readily, as if she’s done it before, as if she will again.

Yeah, Steve thinks. Not everybody’s scared of Natasha Romanov.

Not quite.

“If you think Tony Stark is anything less than absolutely thrilled to have his superhero friends come play house with him in his lonely mansion, you haven’t been paying attention,” Natasha says.

It might be cruel, the insinuation.

That’s truth, though. A little cruel, all the time. Never quite kind, never quite not.

And Steve has already figured as much about Stark, he has to admit to himself. It’s an entire world, the difference between the man that Steve had met on the Helicarrier and the one that he’s been seeing glimpses of for the past three weeks.

The one who shows up all hours of the day and night, ordering too much Chinese takeaway and talking too fast about the aerodynamics of Steve’s shield and how unfathomably badly he’s been wasting his twenty-first century experience watching the Oscar winners when everybody knows the B movies are where real culture is born.

Natasha opens a cupboard full of cups and glasses, placing her own decidedly in the middle of the bottom shelf, the words facing out like a signal, or perhaps more like a promise.

When she closes the cupboard door and turns back to find Steve looking at her, she doesn’t blush or flinch, nothing so obvious, but he sees the guarded reservation in her glare.

“I’ll be in the gym if you need a sparring partner,” she says, walking around the other side of the island from him to leave the room. “God knows it’s not like Tony can give you a run for your money.”

Steve smiles, and doesn’t respond. He finishes his coffee in silence, watching New York blossom under the growing light of the sunrise.

He’s still sitting on the worktop when Bruce walks in, over an hour later.

*

“Ok, when did birdbrains reach the nest?” Tony asks later that day, huffing pointedly at the open cupboard in front of him.

Steve glances up at the mug that’s caught his irate attention. Upon closer inspection, he realises it looks a little like someone has painted _The Amazing Hawkeye_ onto a regular porcelain cup and thrown glitter on it.

Tony seems not so much upset by what he assumes is Barton’s presence, rather the unannounced nature of it.

“Haven’t seen him,” Steve replies truthfully.

Tony scowls, and asks JARVIS for answers.

JARVIS is unexpectedly good at evasion, and Steve supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that Natasha might have trouble with people, if the rumours are anything close to truth, but she can get an AI programme on her side with little difficulty.

*

“Where _is_ Barton?” Steve asks her four days later, while they sit on the kitchen worktop again, nursing coffee and eating leftover take out.

Natasha keeps fishing out all the pieces of broccoli from her food, dropping the florets into Steve’s bowl without asking.

She eats two more pieces of beef, picks up her prized Hawkeye mug for another sip of coffee and puts it back safely between her knees.

“They’re having some kind of memorial for Coulson,” she says instead of answering, looking down at her bowl of food like it’s a mirror to the underworld. “Took them long enough to decide.”

Steve half expects her to leave, then.

She doesn’t.

She puts another little green tree into his bowl, finishing her food slowly and inviting no further comment or enquiry.

Whatever she’s looking for in Steve’s stilted, earnest company, he hopes she finds it.

*

Steve tries hard not to ask about Phil Coulson, but it’s tricky, sometimes.

He thinks about those cards, the ones with his face, and another man’s blood. Who gave them to him, and when, and why.

*

Steve has these dreams sometimes.

Nightmares.

He has nightmares.

He dreams about Brooklyn.

The way it used to sound and smell. The way music bounced differently off the walls back then, and the way rain used to fill the gutters and splash onto the sidewalk in waterfalls.

He dreams about Brooklyn. His mom, her frustration and her love. The cool touch of her fingers on the fever of his brow, her worried voice humming lullabies; the way she’d look at her son and say, _Lord forgive me, but you are a mule, Steven Rogers._

She died thinking she was leaving her son to nothing. She died thinking he’d get taken by asthma, or influenza; that by some flaw in her genes she’d failed him.

Steve dreams about her, about all the things he never properly told her.

Only, in his dreams, when he kneels next to her bed, his hand feathered in her matted hair, the flutter of death hanging in her every racketing exhale, his knees are caked in mud. Wet mud. Thick mud. Austrian mud.

He can smell gunpowder and the leather sweat of army.

He’s sinking deep into the mud, and his mom is shivering and _Bucky._

Bucky’s there, behind him, saying _Steve, Steve, take my hand, grab it, grab my hand, Steve,_ but try as he might Steve can’t turn around. Bucky’s yelling his name, and the ground is sodden, the mud rising up to his thighs, and Steve’s holding his mom’s ashy body as she drifts, sinks, vanishes.

 _“Steve! Please! Steve!”_ Bucky yells, as wheels scrape metallic over creaking tracks.

Steve wrenches himself away from his mom, the mud and her tears clinging to him; he heaves and pulls but he can’t turn as Bucky’s voice is overcome with the clattering of hailstones on car rooftops, like the storms they’d watch through the window in winter.

Steve bellows and breaks and the mud claws up to his waist as it freezes. Freezes over.

Ice bites into his chest, into his armpits. Takes hold of his scrambling hands as frost glues his eyes shut and sludge fills his mouth, and the sound of the icy sea carries him deep, deep into the heart of the storm, where he can no longer hear Bucky, and where nobody can hear him.

*

Steve wakes up violently, retching and heaving. He topples out of his bed in a tangle of flapping limbs.

The pain of the landing jolts him, hard and helpful, and he shivers, sweating into the floor.

 _“Captain Rogers, do you require assistance?”_ a voice asks and for a moment he lashes out in a heavy thumping swing, only to meet with air.

JARVIS.

Steve takes a steadying breath. Pulls himself to his knees and curls into them, so his forehead is on the floor and his hands are tucked to his chest. Hidden from himself and the world, he lets the panic consume him for three blinding seconds before,

“I’m fine, JARVIS. Thank you.”

_“Might I suggest a glass of water. I could put some music, or soothing sounds on for you.”_

Steve tries very hard not to think of JARVIS as a person, but the AI makes it incredibly difficult, especially at times like this.

“Uhh, music. Music would be good, thanks.”

Gentle, tinkering notes of a piano immediately start playing, almost too quietly to be heard.

Steve breathes into his knees, his forehead still kissing the floor. He rides out the Arctic waves in steady growing breaths.

It’s almost an hour before he decides the discomfort of his position outweighs the solace of not having to look at everything, including himself. He uncurls, his spine stiff, his t-shirt tacky with sweat.

Once he’s upright again, he glances at the clock on the cabinet. It’s only just gone half-past two in the morning.

The piano is still playing. He can recognise the melodies of Chopin, and waits as his heartbeat slowly settles into the rhythm of it. He glances at the bed, strangled damp sheets and squashed pillows, and feels queasy at the thought of returning to it.

So, just like every time before, he looks up at the ceiling because it’s an unbreakable habit, and says,

“JARVIS, is anybody in the gym downstairs right now?”

 _“No, Captain,”_ JARVIS replies, the same as always.

And, the same as always, an unfathomable pang of disappointment curls in Steve’s chest as he makes his way down.

*

Steve has this dream, sometimes. This nightmare.

He dreams he’s Captain America.

*

Steve goes to the memorial and he tries not to ask too many questions.

Tony says he isn’t coming, but when Steve arrives, he’s already there, wearing a beautifully tailored suit and hiding expertly behind both it and the arm Pepper Potts has linked around his.

Steve likes Pepper. She’s pragmatic and sensible and fearless, and she asks easy, kind questions of Steve when they talk. Things like _Do you know about Spotify yet? You’ll love it. Let me show you._

She doesn’t talk down to him. It’s surprising how often people do, to say Steve’s as tall as he is.

“Did Coulson have anyone?” Steve asks, as they stand quietly to the side, avoiding the sidelong glances of various SHIELD members.

There’s a pause in their non-conversation.

Tony looks about one soft word away from breaking out his Iron Man suit. Bruce seems to be attempting to master the ability to actually shrink into the ground through the power of shoulder hunching. Pepper’s mouth twists in a lemony grimace.

“A cellist,” she says, and Steve had thought Tony was being sarcastic when he had said it before, but apparently not.

It takes a while to spot Natasha.

She’s wearing her basic SHIELD gear, like a few other agents. When Fury acknowledges those under Phil Coulson’s care throughout his time at SHIELD in a brief set of words that are both empty and full to the brim of their vowels, her head dips a little, and her eyes dart to Steve, as if she knows she’s being watched.

There’s something accusatory in the way she stares at him, like the way she’d stared across the street a month ago, expectant, anticipatory.

Then she glances towards a door at the back of the room.

Steve follows her line of sight, drags his eyes across the tight shoulders and bowed heads, the tissues crumpled in hands and the glasses brought to mouths in solemn commemoration.

Standing just in the doorway, a sentry almost unseen, hidden in plain sight and maybe Steve had actually _walked past him_ on his way in, is Clint Barton.

He’s in SHIELD gear, too, and while he isn’t the only one wearing an unmarked cap, he’s the only one with it low enough on his head to cast a shadow over his face.

It does nothing to hide the purple bruises that have swallowed up his eyes like a raccoon. His nose is swollen, like it’s been punched, maybe more than once. There’s another splotch on his lower lip, too, a cut through the corner.

Barton doesn’t look up, not at Natasha nor at Steve, but Steve has a strong feeling he knows he’s being watched. He keeps his eyes on the floor five feet in front of him, his hands clasped behind his back.

As soon as Fury stops to offer his thanks to everyone in the room, Barton slips out of the room unnoticed.

*

Well, almost.

*

Steve tries very hard to pretend he doesn’t know exactly how Barton will have gotten those bruises.

He goes back to the tower and he listens to Tony snarl with champagne bubble spite at the smug bureaucracy of SHIELD and Fury’s token bloodletting.

Pepper doesn’t look worried when he pulls out a fresh bottle of scotch, so Steve just accepts a glass rather than telling him to stop. The alcohol does nothing for him, but the burning taste works wonders all the same as it runs too smooth down his throat.

He remembers being handed a glass of amber in a tin cup in France, trading sips with Bucky, both of them laughing at the blisters they were going to get on their tongues from the cheap scorch of it.

He’s been remembering a lot of things about Bucky, lately.

There’s the broken nose he got for stepping in on Steve’s usual scrappy anger, planting himself like a tree between Steve and the four assholes from 29B. The black eyes he sported for weeks after the fight, the way he looked with blood running from his nostrils into his mouth.

Natasha doesn’t come back to the tower until closer to two in the morning, by which time Tony has put down his glass but is still riding the buzz of the alcohol.

She waltzes in, helping herself to scotch, but before she can finish pouring more than a finger, she abandons the effort and leaves the glass untouched.

Pepper sinks it before Tony can pick it up.

*

“Where in god’s name is Barton?” Tony asks, staring at the ceiling the way Steve still sometimes does when he’s talking to JARVIS, even though he’s pretty sure that’s not how it works. How _JARVIS_ works.

“He’s at SHIELD, Tony,” Bruce says tiredly, drinking out of a mug, and how he escaped Tony’s demands for another round of scotch Steve doesn’t know, but he wants his technique for future use. “He’s under psych eval. Remember?”

Steve doesn’t remember, and apparently neither does Tony.

“I say we break him out. That’ll really piss Fury off. Hey, Natalie, does that mean the Hawkeye mug is _yours?_ Oh man, we should all have mugs. Novelty mugs. Hero mugs. Mugs for heroes. A whole tree of Hero Mugs. _Amazing._ I don’t know. _Quite good,_ maybe. Above average, but only with weaponry that pre-dates organised religion and dinosaurs.”

It goes on for a while, and when Steve looks at Natasha, she’s drinking coffee and looking entirely indifferent to the rather rude things Tony is saying about her best friend, and her employers, and her life choices.

At one point, she walks over to Pepper and pours her three fingers of booze without asking, and Pepper just thanks her quietly. When she reaches to take Natasha’s wrist, Natasha evades her with such quick expertise it makes Steve’s heart flip.

They go to bed before six, but not by much.

*

“Did you know about the cellist?” Steve asks.

Natasha’s entire being stiffens, and it’s a good thing they’ve just agreed to finish their spar there, because he thinks he’s stepped on a snake’s tail. Sweat is trickling down her face and she runs a hand up her forehead, smoothing down stray strands of hair on her head.

She rarely manages to bring him down and keep him down, given his rather unfair advantages, but Steve has the uncanny feeling if she tried right now, she’d do it easily.

Natasha slings a towel around her neck, scoops up a water bottle from the stash they keep in the gym and flexes out her knees.

“There was no cellist,” she says coolly, as if rallying off football scores, utterly uninterested.

She’s not even looking at him as she leaves.

*

Sometimes, Steve’s heart does these little flips and spasms. He feels them, as real as needles in his skin, or saltwater in his lungs.

That, he thinks, is what a break really is. It’s not a snap, or a crack, or a splinter. It’s a squeeze, like the clenching of a fist. A breathless, terrible thing.

*

(“Hey, Cap,” he says, and his grin is red. He’s utterly unafraid, until he’s terrified.)

*

Stark Tower becomes Avengers Tower, officially, on a Tuesday.

Four days later, they celebrate by having a big party in some of the lower levels of the building.

Well, Tony Stark celebrates by having a big party, to which the other occupants are forcibly invited on pain of a PR smear.

Hawkeye and Black Widow smugly agree, because they’re never a part of the press related fanfare when it involves photos, thanks to their active SHIELD statuses. The others aren’t so lucky.

Steve attends, and he wears a suit that just about nods at his Captain America colours, and he smiles between Thor and Tony for a frontpage photo and talks about all the hard work that’s gone into the clean-up of New York City after the attack.

He drinks champagne that can’t get him drunk, eats canapes that are so small he honestly feels hungrier after eating them than he was before, and eventually finds himself laughing at a joke he didn’t even listen to the punchline of.

A young woman he’s pretty sure works in the Mayor’s office smiles at him with coy flirtation, and Steve does his level best to at least not frown at her before excusing himself from the group.

It feels as if everyone is watching as he picks his way through the room, sidestepping a political aide and two journalists and scooping up a generous whiskey from the bar on his way out to one of the quieter rooms. Across, towards the windowed wall, he sees Pepper Potts in deep conversation with her head of security.

She’s dressed in a warm shade of darkest green, and her laughter carries over people’s heads, infectious and lovely.

Steve wonders, sometimes, in his least kind moments, if Tony is even aware of the miracle of this woman’s love and time for him.

For a moment, he considers going over to the pair. It’s a safe bet, he knows he won’t be turned away, and it will be a few minutes’ reprieve from the gawking demands of being a ladder rung for social climbers to step on.

He thinks better of it, and chooses to take himself to the leftmost corner, where he can politely look at a huge painting on the wall that might be of a tree, but also might be a lot of meaninglessly colourful shapes and lines.

He’s almost halfway through his bourbon when he sees someone step in line beside him, looking up at the painting.

Clint is wearing a well-tailored grey suit that Tony undoubtedly bullied him into, as well as an expression of such stubborn amusement, it makes Steve’s entire body relax, just a fraction.

Looking unimpressed by the painting, Clint looks at Steve and grins, holding an empty champagne flute delicately between both hands with glitter in his eyes.

“You, look like Artemis,” he says, full of glee.

Steve raises his eyebrows in polite confusion.

“How exactly do I look like a Greek Goddess?” he asks coolly, sipping his bourbon.

Clint shifts one shoulder, spinning the glass in his hands.

There’s a particular grace to the way he bounces on the balls of his feet, the glass in his hands dancing, catching the light in swift refractions. It’s difficult to tell whether the energy radiating from him is closer to excited or nervous. He’s not fidgeting, per say, but he’s a long way from the laser focused sniper he’d been on their last call out, ten days ago.

“She was one of my very best friends at the circus.”

It’s not the first time Steve’s heard him mention any fragment of his life before SHIELD, not even the first time Steve’s heard him mention the circus. There’s something more pointed about it, this time. Clint’s not normally so forthcoming with details.

Steve wonders if he should keep quiet, if asking might scare away whatever champagne bubble cheer is bringing about this newly informationally accommodating Clint Barton.

“What did Artemis do at the circus?” he asks tentatively, looking back at the painting, at a thick stretch of yellow colouring splattered over green.

Clint flicks his glass around his thumb, catching it and rotating it.

“She jumped through hoops that had been set on fire.”

Steve’s brow furrows, and he looks back at the side of Clint’s face.

“What was Artemis?” he asks, and there’s no missing it, the tuck of Clint’s mouth.

“A tiger,” he replies.

Steve chuckles, shaking his head.

“How exactly do I look like a tiger jumping through flaming hoops in a circus?” Steve asks.

The glass in Clint’s hand stops moving, close to his chest. He’s looking at the painting, but some of the lightness has disappeared from his expression. He’s very still, reading the lines of the painting like scripture.

Steve looks at him, takes in his profile, and the thin band of the hearing aid in his ear.

Clint seems to have a sixth sense for when people are looking at his ears. He turns to look directly at Steve, knowing, not quite accusing, and Steve very nearly blushes. Clint smirks, but it vanishes quickly. It drops into something quieter, less easily defined.

“You look like someone who has been immaculately trained to do exactly what other people want, against every fibre of your being,” Clint says.

Steve feels like he’s been punched in the sternum, hard. His eyes widen, and his breath cuts into his throat. Clint’s never spoken to wound before, not that Steve’s ever known, but he feels the bruise of his words, expertly placed.

In a moment of vengeance, recoiling from the blow of Clint’s accusation, from his sad eyes and the scurrying flick of his fingers twisting his champagne glass quicker than before, Steve says hotly,

“Takes one to know one.”

Nearly flinches at his own retort. He half-expects Clint to close up and walk away. It would hardly be the first time he’s done it.

Clint doesn’t, though. He smiles, quite generously, and taps the edge of his empty glass on the side of Steve’s bourbon.

“Yes, it does,” Clint says with a tilting nod of his head.

It doesn’t soften the blow, but it reflects something back, something that Steve recognises in the lines of Clint’s face.

Clint looks back up at the painting and pulls a bemused expression.

“I don’t think it counts if you need a freaking PhD in art history to understand it,” he mutters with false sincerity.

Steve looks up at the painting, the brushstrokes and the boxed up primary colours fanning out in branches. There’s something soothing about it, the clearly defined layers of red and blue like roots, level with their chests.

“I like it,” he says, and Clint snorts.

“Of course you do, Cap,” he retorts, shaking his head.

“Yo, Cap in the Hat. Mayor wants next year’s lead campaign photo,” Tony says loudly from behind them.

Steve lets out a small sigh, turning on his heel and trying his best not to down his drink in preparation.

Tony’s standing across the room with his hand on the small of Pepper’s back, unnecessary sunglasses on his head and his smile positively sparkling with Stark charm.

Clint doesn’t turn around, but he does lean ever so slightly back onto his heels.

“Jump, kitty, jump,” he whispers, mirthful and melancholy.

Steve downs his drink. He flicks the glass up in the air and just as Clint catches it, Steve murmurs under his breath a quiet, chuckling, “Meow.”

Clint laughs, pushing him by the shoulder away from the painting and towards Tony.

Steve goes, traipsing as reluctantly as he dares, bolstered only by the sympathetic look Pepper throws him, and the equally pitiful expression on Thor’s face as he’s dragged into another discussion about Midgardian politics that he has no interest in endorsing.

By the time the Mayor’s had enough handshakes to last him hopefully until Steve’s next birthday, and Steve has wormed his way out of the teasing laser beam of Tony Stark in full party mode, Clint’s nowhere to be found.

*

Steve knows Tony finds it hard to look at him and not see some grayscale shade of his father.

There’s this particular tone to his voice, an electric spark, reactionary voice, that Steve comes to realise is what happens when he says or does something too reminiscent of Howard for Tony to ignore.

Occasionally it’s obvious what’s pushed Stark into biting back; a turn of phrase or a sentiment, or once, in a near catastrophic misstep, actually starting a sentence with _When Howard was around..._ Thankfully, only Bruce had been around to witness that one, and so only Bruce was forced to endure the toxic fumes of the explosive experiments Tony reigned upon his lab for the next sixty hours.

Steve’s trying. He is.

It’s hard, though, because sometimes, quite often in fact, Tony reminds Steve of Howard, too.

All those excitable, raw nerve endings exposed to the elements of success and failure. Nobody was ever more thrilled by their own brilliance than Howard Stark, it was downright obnoxious, the breadth of his intellect.

Except, nobody was more ashamed of their own shortcomings, either.

Tony has inherited his father’s extremes; that exhaustive, immeasurable scale, north to south in pride and shame.

If Steve didn’t know better, he’d wonder if Stark was Latin for Excess.

So, he tries.

He’s trying his best.

He moves into the rooms Tony offers him, does his utmost to be grateful and not paranoid. Learns the idiosyncrasies that make up a man who ponies around for the public eye in expensive suits like he was born with the flashes of camera lights in his eyes.

The same man who, without asking or even mentioning, has all Steve’s private rooms set to a few degrees warmer than the other areas of the tower.

When he figures it out, Steve is momentarily incensed, filled with indignation at Stark’s assumptive manner.

It doesn’t last. It dissipates almost immediately.

Whether he’ll admit it or not, Steve is goddamn grateful for it.

The problem is, he doesn’t know how to repay that kind of intimately intuitive kindness. He doesn’t have anything to offer Tony, has nothing to give him that he could possibly want or need.

Honestly, he doesn’t really know what Tony needs at all.

*

He finds out, of course.

Finds out too late.

Tony stares at him, hidden behind a blank robot’s face, behind the mask of Iron Man that betrays no wound, and says, that short, quiet, undeserving plea:

“So was I.”

*

Thirty-one days later, that gold face plate flips up, reveals tender sympathy and a reserved, unacknowledged grief.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he says, that same short, quiet, and undeserving plea.

*

The Avengers break up.

The Avengers break up, and when they do it’s for a whole host of reasons, but also, really, just the one.

Blame.

It lays heavy over them, and the sanctuary of their bonds. Trust can survive so many things, but blame, it is toxic, it is corrosive. It destroys everything.

The Avengers break up in the meeting room of the Avengers Tower. They break up at an airport in Germany. They break up at a HYDRA base in Siberia. They break up in a hospital room in Wakanda.

Tony leaves that hospital room swiftly, with his head held high and his hands shaking, while Sam shouts after him. While Steve’s breath cuts his lungs to ribbons and while Bucky is silent and still.

While one of their own lies in the morgue, out of sight, never out of mind.

(It sticks, then. It lasts. Tony walks out of that room, that hospital; out of Wakanda entirely. He flies back to America and by the time Steve returns to those same beloved shores, Tony’s not even breathing the same atmosphere anymore.)

*

 _I had this dream, that I was an Avenger,_ Natasha tells Steve, one day, when they are alone in the tower, and maybe in the whole world.

 _I had that dream, too,_ Steve wants to tell her.

 _It was a good dream,_ he wants to say as well.

He’s not so sure that second part’s true, though.

*

Steve wakes up.

A surge, a spiral. One minute, Gabe’s laughing at the lipstick smudge on Dum Dum’s cheek. The next, that lipstick’s gone, along with half of Dum Dum’s face.

Steve wakes up breathless, soaked, restless. Scrambles to the floor beside his bed and tries to swallow back nonsensical apologies scouring his throat. He eats up his own heartache where it cannot be touched, or tainted.

 _“Captain Rogers, do you require assistance?”_ JARVIS asks.

Steve’s getting better at not being caught off-guard by the intrusion.

“I’m fine, JARVIS. Thank you. Is anybody in the gym downstairs right now?”

 _“No, Captain,”_ JARVIS replies promptly.

Steve doesn’t wait to catch his breath before he’s out of his room, wrapping bandages around his knuckles.

Sweat already dripping down his back, the whistle of gunfire and train tracks in his ears.

All the world’s oceans in his throat.

*

SHIELD first gives him his own apartment a few short weeks after he’s pulled from the ice.

His assigned therapist at the time, Dr Henry Simpson-Veile, had strongly advised against such a huge step towards independent living. Steve had responded politely, decidedly, by informing Nick Fury he would no longer be requiring Dr Simpson-Veile’s services.

Fury had looked disgruntled and resigned as he nodded.

Two days later, and Steve has a set of keys in hand and four whole rooms to himself, still in the D.C. limits, but at least without a window view of the Triskelion.

The solitude is exhilarating and maddening.

It’s loud in the apartment block. Music, televisions, shouting, laughing, dogs, birds, grown-ups, kids.

One tenant watches the same film three times in one night, and Steve isn’t sure _what_ belongs in a museum, but the hero of the movie really seems to care about it.

There’s a lot of Nazi mentions and the good guys win, from what Steve can gather through the wall separating them. Steve tries not to think about how many hundreds of films must be about, or even just glibly mention the war, _his_ war; an historical reference point to them, the stuff of laboured dreams and thoughts to him.

Steve can still recall the hushed horror of a world rent apart by war, the abhorrent realisation that the war to end all wars had done no such thing. Had in fact merely set a precedent to be built from.

Steve went into the ice before the twentieth century had hit the halfway mark.

He’s been catching up, best he can, but he’s stuck, stuck on something awful.

According to one of the books he picks up in the library, an estimated 187 million deaths were caused by war in the century of his making.

It sits upon his heart, his soul, the memories of the dead, of whom he is not one.

He’s trapped. Trapped in four rooms, four walls. This city, this state, this country. This world. This world he doesn’t recognise, that has twisted up so many parts of what he loved. Changed them, for the better, also for the worse.

There’s a museum with Steve’s history splashed across its walls; there are entire books written about things that, for Steve, happened less than six months ago.

 _(You’re grieving, Steve,_ Alma will say, later, but he hasn’t met her yet, hasn’t made coffee in her office, memorised the patterns of her speech, asked about the pink gemstone on her left ring finger and laughed at the dry tone of her judgement.)

Steve exists. He endures. He survives.

He doesn’t dare think to himself, _Surely, there must be more than this?_

He doesn’t dare. Not yet, anyway.

That comes later.

*

Steve has this dream, haunting him.

This nightmare.

*

Steve wakes up gasping, gnarled up in blankets, and he kicks them off hastily.

He’s trembling as he wipes the sweat from his face. Sits on the edge of the bed, grounds himself with his feet flat on the floor, his hands gripping the mattress hard enough for his fingers to rip the fabric, and he winces.

He gulps down oxygen greedily.

 _“Captain Rogers, do you require assistance?”_ JARVIS asks.

The question is barely out there before Steve is responding.

“No, JARVIS. I’m fine. Thank you. Is anybody in the gym downstairs?”

He’s already getting shakily to his feet, stripping out of his damp clothes and putting on fresh sweats, his lungs hurting sharp behind his ribs.

 _“No, Captain,”_ JARVIS responds.

Sometimes, Steve has the bizarre feeling that JARVIS sounds sad, or pleased, or angry.

Only, he can’t be.

Can he?

Hurriedly redressed, Steve’s almost at his bedroom door when JARVIS, for the first time, interrupts his departure.

_“However, Captain, it might be of interest to you to know that Agent Barton is in the range upstairs.”_

Steve pauses, stalled by the information. Both the fact of it, and that JARVIS would mention as much at all. He’s got one hand on the doorframe, the other on the handle, and he stares out at the shadows spilling through his apartment.

JARVIS has never offered up further, unsolicited information before when Steve’s asked.

Is that because it’s never been true before, or something else?

“How long has he been there, JARVIS?”

_“Since twelve minutes past eleven last night, Captain.”_

Steve glances at his bedside clock. It’s almost three thirty in the morning. He thinks about the gym downstairs, blessedly empty. The comfortably warm air, the scrape of a punching bag across the worn floor and the give of the mats underfoot. The tranquil quiet of his own dissipating anxieties bleeding out into the air, like a toxin leaving his body.

He thinks about Clint, upstairs. The worn look on his face when he’d come back from his SHIELD mission four days ago, the way it had transformed into a playful, tumbling smirk when he’d realised he wasn’t alone.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Steve says.

 _“You’re welcome, Captain,”_ JARVIS says.

Sometimes, Steve has the bizarre feeling that JARVIS sounds awfully pleased with himself.

Steve hasn’t spent much time at the range in the months since moving into the tower. Tony had started putting real effort into a fully functioning archery range somewhere between _Where in God’s name is Barton_ and _I say we break him out,_ and while Steve puts in his time with firearms practice, it’s not something he’s ever much cared for.

Expansive, high-ceilinged and regularly updated with some of Tony’s favourite tech test toys, they haven’t officially renamed the range level _Barton’s Playground,_ but that’s only because there’s not enough room on an elevator button for anything more than the number _47._

When he gets there, he enters through the unlocked door with a firm push and without hesitation, perhaps just to prevent himself from backing out at the last moment.

He has no doubt that Clint spots him immediately, but three more arrows fly before he stops firing, all landing one after another in a perfectly equilateral formation around a target bullseye.

Despite his dry throat and the weak, hollow sensation in his knuckles, Steve smiles.

Clint’s got his bow in his hand, hanging loosely by his side, and he turns to look at Steve with his whole body. He’s alert, not quite tense, and his quick eyes dart over Steve piece by piece, taking him in. Steve tries not to hunch his shoulders. He knows he looks a far cry from put together.

In fact, this is feeling more and more like one of his poorer decisions.

What the hell was he thinking? Hawkeye’s in a training range at half three in the morning. He’s not here because he’s got nothing better to do. He’s got his own damn problems.

Steve clenches his fists to keep himself from doing something embarrassing like rub the back of his neck, and glances away to the furthest targets at he says, awkwardly,

“JARVIS said you were here.”

Clint snaps his fingers at him, once, loudly.

When Steve looks back, Clint uses two fingers of his free hand to point first at his eyes, then his mouth, before tapping his right ear once, looking grumpy.

Steve flushes, and feels his fingers scratching his neck like a squirming kid before he can stop them.

“JARVIS said you were here,” he repeats more clearly to Clint’s face.

Steve has absolutely no idea what Clint sees in his expression, if he betrays some modicum of lost-cold-tired-awake-shaken that’s still thrumming in his core. Whatever it is, it makes Clint grimace.

Slinging his bow back over his shoulder, Clint reaches into a small pocket of his cargo pants and pulls out his hearing aids, slotting them into place as he walks slowly towards the door. He stops a few feet away, and Steve gets a better look at the sleepless draw of his eyelids, and the ghost of a graze on his bicep that hasn’t healed yet.

“What can I do, Cap?” Clint asks.

Something slides far out of Steve’s control. Some snarl of emotion he can’t pinpoint, some slice of sense that refuses to connect the flashes of his poor sleep and the heart pounding silence of his wakening. He opens his mouth, but words fail him and so does logic, and he drops his gaze to the floor, trying to claw back some of his control.

When he takes a breath, he can _hear_ it stutter.

He’s so grateful for Clint asking that, for not asking something Steve can’t quantify _(what do you need)_ or something Steve can’t qualify _(what do you want)_ or God forbid, something Steve doesn’t even have the words for at all _(what’s wrong),_ so grateful for it all that there’s an elongated stretch of inexplicable silence in his non-answer.

“Hey,” Clint says, stepping closer, one arm outstretched. “Hey, look at me. Steve, look at me.”

When he looks up, what Steve means to say is, _I’m sorry for bothering you, Clint._

What he means to say is, _You should probably get some shuteye, Hawk._

What he means to say is, _Not a damn thing, Barton._

Instead, his traitorous tongue trips right past all the options his mind throws up for the grab and what comes out instead is a slightly choked, riddling and anxious,

“Everyone gets bad dreams.”

Clint doesn’t seem to react, at first. His hand is still outstretched, his eyes steady and his breathing slow.

Then, he brings his hand back to his side, licks his lips and says,

“Yeah, we do.”

That’s not exactly what Steve meant, and Clint probably knows that. They stand, stalemate, each one waiting for the other to break the curse of their own inhibiting bad dreams. Steve doesn’t think he’s surprised Clint by the idea of having bad dreams, but he’s surprised himself by admitting it.

Hell, Clint’s surprised him on that front, too.

Steve searches his face for some inclination of his thoughts, but of course, there’s nothing. Clint’s a performer in his bones, and Steve knows that almost every expression he’s ever seen in Hawkeye’s face is one that he was meant to see.

Not all of them, but almost.

Which is when he accidentally throws himself another curveball. A question he didn’t even know he needed answering.

“What happened to Artemis?”

This time, Clint _does_ look surprised. His eyebrows tilt upwards, and he stands a little straighter.

Odd, in a way, because Steve hadn’t even noticed he was slouching before.

“Nothing,” Clint replies, snow on snow in the mountains, far away. Untouched, lonely. “She died in her cage.”

It wrenches in Steve’s gut, no matter how softly Clint admits it.

“I can’t think of anything worse,” he says.

Clint actually _smiles_ at that one.

“Neither can I,” he replies, melancholic charm in his shrug. He glances around the range. “Need to shoot something?”

Steve cracks his thumbs, as if considering, but he already knows the answer. He didn’t come to the range to shoot things.

He thinks, maybe, it won’t be the last time.

“Not really,” he replies.

Clint reaches around to pull something from the side of his quiver.

“Ok,” he says, and holds out a flat black disc, an inch or so wide, with a metallic shine. “Then throw this.”

Steve looks up and down the range, taking a few steps further into the room after Clint, who’s got his bow back in his hand, his weight on the balls of his feet.

“Where?” Steve asks.

Clint grins, and it’s that playful, tumbling smirk again, but it sits better on his face, this time. Steve even kind of believes it, this time.

“Anywhere,” Clint answers.

Steve tosses and catches it once in his palm, runs his thumb over the flat side, feels the invisible ridges in the metal.

He throws it hard towards the east corner.

His heart beats, strong, without labour, his breath comes easier, and he hears more than sees the snap of the nocked arrow in Clint’s hand before it’s skewered the disc, pinning it into the angled corner of the room.

Steve snorts, and holds out his hand.

Clint unclips the compartment from his training quiver and holds it out.

“Not the red ones,” he says, and when Steve lifts his brow like a challenge he rolls his eyes. “I mean it, Rogers. I know Princess Stark likes redecorating on a biweekly basis, but I actually _like_ this range.”

Steve plucks a dark green disc out of the box and flings it west in response.

Clint laughs, loose as a leaf in the breeze, and snags it with an arrow, quickly followed by two more to hit the subsequent halves that ricochet in opposite directions when split.

There’s a rhythm to it, and routine ease. Steve throws discs until his shoulders are warm with a pleasant ache and Clint’s complaining about callouses on his callouses, and it’s only when Clint slaps the space between his shoulder blades that Steve realises he’s breathing just fine, and the train tracks in his mind are little more than the rumbling of his own steady lungs.

*

There’s an evening, far into the future, just around the corner, when Steve sits in the pilot’s seat of a quinjet and torments himself with an ugly kind of regret, the bitter kind that waylays remorse.

Clint lets himself in, and Steve doesn’t stop him.

He holds out a huge thermos, metallic blue with a stupid ring of white stars around the lid and a red stripe around the bottom.

“If you’re going to sulk here all night, you may as well do it with coffee,” Clint tells him in a hard, chastising voice.

Because Steve, he can do the _disappointed Captain_ thing, can do it all day long, but Clint, he has this way of talking like he’s an exasperated parent, and Steve thinks he knows where he learned it from. _Whom_ he learned it from.

“I’m not –” he starts, but Clint cuts him off, putting the thermos on the floor at Steve’s feet and stepping back pointedly.

“Sorry, not sulking?” he scoffs. “Brooding, then. You and Bucky have that much in common.”

Steve winces, and Clint sees it, and it all goes a bit pear-shaped from there.

*

Before that, though. Before the flight to Iowa and the look on Buck’s face, awe and guilt and hope; before the droop of Clint’s head as he ducks away and the cut of Natasha’s voice saying _You said some hurtful, blindly stupid things_ and _Don’t run away from this,_ the bruise on Steve’s chin and the downturn of Clint’s mouth and the reserved clench of Buck’s jaw.

Before all that.

There’s this.

*

“Where are they?”

Nick Fury looks about as pleased to see Captain America standing in his office as Steve feels to be standing there.

Steve’s been talking himself out of coming for over fifty hours, which is a level of self-restraint he might be quite proud of on any other day.

Another day, when he isn’t agitated, when he hasn’t been thinking about the way Tony had bounded out of his lab, abuzz with jittery metaphors about bird-eating spiders and the words _JARVIS just lost the assassins_ rolling off his coffee stained tongue.

 _Did you put trackers in our teammates?_ Bruce had asked, far more reasonably than Steve would have phrased it, sounding at worst only a little bit judgemental.

 _Tony, what if someone hacked your signal?_ Was all Steve could think to say that didn’t require the additional input of his hands wrapping around the man’s throat with frustration.

As well as talking himself out of tracking down Fury and demanding answers for the past fifty hours, Steve has also been decidedly not listening to Tony talk about the apparently monumental difference between JARVIS being able to remotely keep track of StarkTech, and Tony actively tracking his teammates with GPS implants.

(The difference does not seem very monumental at all to Steve. Luckily, Bruce seems to mostly agree.)

Steve had answered a call from Maria Hill at four in the afternoon, getting nothing more from her than _We’ve got a full nest_ and then that had been that.

For fifty-four hours.

Now, Steve has planted himself with oak root will in Fury’s office, and is perfectly ready to wait out the devil himself, so long as it gets him some answers.

“Where are they?” he asks and Fury looks a lot like he has no interest in sharing, which in Steve’s experience is coming to mean something else entirely.

“You’ll get your sniper and spy back when they’re good and ready, Captain Rogers,” Fury says, and Steve surprises himself with a little burst of sarcastic laughter.

“You mean you don’t know.”

“I mean, SHIELD does not have their location on official record, Captain,” Fury says. “I’m not a babysitter. Barton and Romanov were not in need of medical assistance. They have a debrief scheduled. If they don’t show up for it, _then_ I’ll start letting my knickers get twisted but until such a time as Hawkeye and Black Widow are not exactly where I expect them to be, I really do not care where they go on their own watch.”

Steve hears a lot of things in those words, and in the curl of Fury’s dismissal, but most of it is _SHIELD does not_ and _I really do not care._

Before he can make his thoughts on such sentiments clear, however, somebody interrupts.

“You wanted to see me, Director,” the entering woman says.

She’s an agent, one with a familiar face. Steve is certain they’ve never been introduced.

“Yes, Agent. Please will you escort Captain Rogers back to his jet? I believe he’s late for an appointment.”

Steve has absolutely no words for either the worst lie he’s ever heard or the best case of sheer ballsy blindsiding he’s ever been privy to. He looks from Fury to the woman, perplexed, and tries to summon the correct refusal that doesn’t involve stamping his feet like a child. Unfortunately, none come to mind.

“Happy to, sir,” the woman says, all business and wry amusement. “Captain?”

She holds the door open for him, and Steve can ether rebuff her, which is against his nature, or acquiesce, which is equally against his nature.

With one final glance at Fury, all suspicion and disbelief, Steve leaves through the open door, feeling an awful lot like a tiger licked by flames.

The woman shuts the door and swiftly overtakes him, leading the way at a clip, her tread silent in a pair of soft soled shoes. Her dark hair, a nutty shade of red and brown, is tied up in a neatly coiled bun, revealing a constellation of pale freckles on the back of her neck above the collar of her shirt.

“Sorry you wasted your trip, Captain,” she says.

“I don’t have an appointment, you know,” Steve says in a droll voice.

When the woman looks over at him, her dark hazel-green eyes are lacking the dry humour of her voice. There’s a deep well of compassion in that look, one that makes it a little easier to follow her out of the Triskelion.

Standing in the clear, cold sunshine outside, she holds out her hand to shake his.

This is a rarity among SHIELD agents, who typically either salute or nod. Or, on one occasion, offer a timid and blushing wave that they are humiliated by as soon as they’ve done it. Despite his frustration, Steve takes her hand, shaking once firmly. She has a strong, unyielding grip.

He’s about to turn away, when she calls after him.

“Captain Rogers,” she says, and there remains only that fitful compassion in her eyes as she holds out a small card. “Don’t want to be late, do you?”

Frowning, he takes it from her without looking.

“What’s your name, Agent?” he asks.

The woman smirks, trilling back on her heels with a secretive gleam in her eyes.

“We’re an organisation of spies, Captain,” she says, sounding facile and shocked in a manner so reminiscent of Barton, Steve very nearly raises his brow. “I can’t tell you everything. That would be cheating.”

She’s already back inside the main building by the time Steve looks down at the card in his hands.

At first glance it’s blank. When he flips it over, he sees, barely visible to the naked eye, several words written down in thin slanting lines.

It’s an address in New York City.

Bed-Stuy, to be precise.

Steve frowns, and looks back up, even though the agent’s long gone.

He never does find out her name.

*

It’s an apartment block.

Steve makes his way up to the third floor, to an insignificant looking white door, just as the card instructs.

He knocks three times, waits three minutes.

Clint opens the door, looking harrowed and bruised, body and soul. He accepts the wordless hug Steve folds him into, standing in the middle of a shabby, cosy living room, with the dropping light pouring in through a small window, and the smell of steeping ginger coming from the kitchen.

Steve doesn’t stay long, but he does come back, the following morning, bearing donuts and coffee.

Clint still doesn’t let him see Natasha, but he does meet Lucky.

*

Lucky’s a dog.

*

Lucky’s a goddamn gorgeous dog.

*

Steve has this dream. This nightmare of a dream that keeps on coming back.

He wakes up from it like the burst of a thundercloud after a drought. Shaking, drowning, scourging. He can smell copper and salt, taste steel and ice. He can’t rid himself of it.

He wakes up.

*

Steve visits Clint’s apartment block in Bed-Stuy precisely eleven times.

Six of those times, Natasha’s there.

One of those times, Clint isn’t.

Five of those times, there’s a one-eyed golden retriever with kisses to spare and a shaggy coat and a tail that seems to be in perpetual danger of breaking itself with such enthusiastic wagging.

Twice, Bucky’s there.

And once, there’s someone else.

*

It’s more out of spite than anything else, that drives Steve to say yes when Clint offers him a place to crash after they finish their mission two days early.

Neither of them want to have to return to the Avengers Tower before Saturday, because missions are pretty much the _only_ reason Tony considers possibly acceptable for missing a Stark Expo and neither of them are remotely interested in getting pushed into going.

He could go back to the apartment SHIELD gave him in D.C.; he could go back to HQ and report in to Fury.

Only, Clint’s look of labour makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of either of those options.

“Steve, I’ve got a spare room with your name on it. I’ll even make sure Lucky’s home. You’re his favourite Avenger you know, ever since your base treachery with the burgers.”

“I’m just a likeable guy, Hawkeye,” Steve shrugs, grinning, and Clint rolls his eyes as he fiddles with his phone for a moment.

“Come on, Cap,” he says dryly. “You’re dead on your feet. You can even _nap_ when we get there before dinner, if you like. I know how you golden oldies like your shuteye.”

Steve doesn’t respond to this, because his retort is interrupted by a lionlike yawn that makes Clint snicker.

Steve tries his best not to rise to it.

*

Lucky’s nowhere to be found when they reach Bed-Stuy. Clint seems unperturbed.

“He’ll show up soon enough,” he says.

Steve’s been curious as to who exactly takes care of Lucky eighty percent of the time, but all the answer he’s ever been afforded is _A friend,_ and Steve’s learned to pick his battles where extracting personal information from Clint is concerned, so he’s accepted that is all he’s ever going to know.

He allows himself to be pushed towards Clint’s spare room, where there is indeed a bed already made up.

It’s a plainly decorated room, with a wall covered in puncture marks that look suspiciously like target practice, and a matching cabinet and wardrobe set. On another wall, there’s a mount bearing a quiver and bow that looks more ornamental than functional.

(There’s a chair near the window, that one day, Doctor Alma Ricci will sit in, but not yet.)

The mission hadn’t been too taxing, all things considered. The suspected HYDRA terrorist cell had turned out to be a regular terrorist cell. Unfortunately, it had been one that had gotten their hands on some slightly vintage StarkTech.

“We should tell Tony _this_ is a better way of using his special JARVIS stalker tracker,” Clint had sneered none too lightly over the comms, but Steve had known he was only joking.

They’ve learned their lesson by now, about mentioning illicit use of StarkTech.

More importantly, they’ve learned their lesson about mentioning to _Tony_ how useful the bad guys often find his past inventions.

Still, super serum or no, not even Steve is immune to an adrenaline crash, and he crawls into the bed readily, unquestioningly, and does his level best not to wonder when exactly Hawkeye’s word was all he needed to trust a location was secure.

 _If you want this team to work together,_ he’d told Fury, over a year ago, and he’d been right, hadn’t he?

 _You did a pretty good job of trusting Barton already_ , Fury had retorted, and yeah, fine, maybe he’d been right, too.

The point is simple.

Clint tells Steve, _We’re safe here,_ so Steve believes him, and promptly sinks into a much needed sleep with little encouragement.

And it’s because Clint has told him _We’re safe here_ that when Steve wakes up to the sound of a stranger’s voice somewhere in the apartment, he doesn’t leap out of bed with his shield in his hand.

Instead, his shield stays propped up against the side of the bed while he rolls onto his back, rubs at his eyelashes and tries to figure out the new voice.

A woman’s. Young, he’d guess, with an excitable, teasing edge to her lazy consonants. She’s not native to New York; there’s a stretch of the Midwest in her vowels, but that could be as easily adopted at Natasha’s neat, neutral American syllables.

The woman seems to be bickering playfully with Clint, and there’s the unmistakeable clicking of nails on the wooden floor of the living room. Lucky’s here.

As Steve reaches for the trousers he’d left lying over the foot of the bed, moving very slowly, rolling out the muscles of his shoulders which feel tight, freshly healed, the woman laughs, just shy of loudly. It’s a bright, bubbly sound, infectious, and ever so slightly knifelike.

_“Clint, Clint, I have a very important question. Like, the fate of our nation hangs in the balance here.”_

Clint’s sigh is audible and pointed.

 _“What?”_ he asks, sounding closer to exhausted than entertained.

_“Are you sleeping with Captain America?”_

Steve freezes, one leg in his trousers and the other still out, staring at the closed door of the bedroom.

He’s incredibly glad there’s nobody around to see the blush he is absolutely certain is staining his cheeks.

The other thing he is absolutely certain of is, not only is he very much _not_ sleeping with Hawkeye, that is also not in any way something he anticipates ever happening, is not something he ever wants to happen. For the space of a sharp intake of breath, Steve thinks he’s just blundered into something he is very, _very_ much not ready to deal with right now.

Several things go through Steve’s mind, then, that he is not proud of, nor will he ever give voice to as long as he lives.

Sounding completely unphased, Clint snorts,

_“No, and will you keep your damn voice down?”_

The woman refuses to be deterred.

 _“Oh,”_ she says, sounding disappointed, before bounding on, sounding a lot like Steve imagines Lucky would sound like, if Lucky was not a one-eyed golden retriever. _“Ok wait, another one. Do you want to sleep with Captain America?”_

This time, Steve doesn’t even have time to panic over Hawkeye’s answer before he’s responding.

_“No, I do not!”_

Steve lets out of very calm breath, wriggling into his jeans and absolutely despising the wave of relief that rushes through him at the undeniable sincerity of his friend’s voice, leaving a strong taste of guilt in its wake.

 _“What – I ok,”_ the woman stumbles over her response, still not lowering her voice despite Clint’s repeated shushing. _“Ok, ok, last question. Like, the most important question of all. Are you ready?”_

Clint’s response sounds about as inviting as the cocking of a gun, and Steve rather thinks the woman has to have no self-preservation whatsoever, or know Clint _incredibly_ well, that she keeps on going at all.

_“Why don’t you want to sleep with Captain America?”_

This, for reasons Steve is if anything even more grateful for, seems to be the last straw on the proverbial camel’s back of Clint’s patience.

  _“Because he’s my friend, you asshole!”_ Clint says, much louder than before to match his other guest’s outrage. He chuffs out a laugh that sounds uncomfortable and forcibly amused, and Steve smiles at the door when he adds, _“And he’s not my type, anyway.”_

_“He’s Captain Steve Freaking Rogers, Barton. He’s everybody’s type!”_

Steve isn’t prone to taking an immediate dislike to people. Well, he’s trying not to be, ever since meeting Howard Stark’s son.

Yet already, through the closed door that he sits on the end of his bed glaring at, he feels a second-hand scarring of belligerence on Clint’s behalf.

Steve is perfectly aware of how he looks, and how little that means to himself in the grand scheme of things, and how much it means to other people. He’s gotten over the quite frankly baffling levels of objectification that come hand in hand with being any kind of celebrity in the twenty-first century, which he supposes is only worse now than seventy years ago because it’s easier to find, thanks to the self-flagellating free-for-all of the internet.

So, hearing from a stranger that he’s _everybody’s type,_ while he isn’t very flattered by it, he’s also not very bothered, either.

He’s far more bothered on behalf of his friend, for the irritated tic in Clint’s voice as he tries to laugh the woman off with a half-handed chuckle of,

_“Not mine. You know I don’t like blonds, Katie.”_

_Katie_ lets out a long, dragging yowl of judgement, and she makes mumbles of love at Lucky, who yips twice with glee.

 _“Oh my god,”_ Katie’s mumbling as Steve buttons up his shirt and casts around the room for wherever he kicked his shoes to. _“I can’t believe it. You absolute waster. I can’t believe I used to look up to you. You used to be my hero, you know.”_

Even as her tone lightens, Steve feels his own shoulders hunching closer to his ears.

 _“Wow,”_ Katie says between making kissy-puppy sounds at Lucky, whose tail is loudly thumping on the floor. _“Just wow. You know, if this is some celibacy plea to punish yourself for – Clint, wait, Clint!”_

Steve pauses, frozen with the wretched understanding he’s no longer bearing to witness to some affectionate teasing from a close friend, but rather is now privy to something he definitely does not have permission to listen in on.

Unfortunately, there’s nowhere for him to hide from this. Something bangs very loudly outside in the open kitchen and living room, there’s the crack of what sounds like a plate breaking, and the woman’s voice, Katie’s voice, gets louder, a beat quicker.

 _“Ok, that was unfair, I know. Just – no – don’t do that – Clint – Clint – will you at least look at me? Clint! Look at me, you earless d-bag. Fuck you too, Barton,”_ she snaps, but it’s rushed, a little upset, like she’s losing ground she knows she gave up with her own careless words.

Steve tugs his shoes on, one by one, and stands in front of the shut bedroom door, staring hard at it.

There are no more voices coming from the other side.

He can hear movement. Not much, along with the recognisable panting of Lucky undeterred by the disagreement unfolding before him.

Steve stalls, wanting nothing more than to walk out into the living room, except for the ninety-nine percent of him that wants to still be asleep, or climbing out the window down the gutter to avoid ever admitting to overhearing this travesty of a jest turned ugly.

When the silence drags, drags until it’s interrupted by a single bark from Lucky, Steve gives into his reluctant temptation and opens his bedroom door.

Clint is standing across the room from a short blonde woman. They’re throwing sharp jabs of sign language back and forth to each other with some violence, flushed and angry, but they stop short before Steve’s fully stepped into the room.

They turn to look at him, staring with an eerily similar gaze at his face.

However, when Steve looks at Clint, something he’s not seen for a long time happens.

Everything drops out of Clint’s face. All the fight and the fear, it vanishes, closes up so fast it’s like somebody’s pressed shut down on Clint Barton. He withdraws, and he turns away from the open space of the room. He stalks back to the hob in the kitchen, which has a pan of something simmering on it.

“Sorry, I didn’t –” Steve tries and fails to lie, because he had obviously heard, and he had obviously meant to interrupt.

The woman, Katie, sighs.

She is quite young, although she can’t be much younger than Steve is. Physically speaking, at least.

Her blonde hair has been pushed back out of her face by a knotted headband, and she’s wearing a sweatshirt that Steve recognises from Clint’s limited non-SHIELD wardrobe, bearing a pixelated picture of a face Steve _still_ doesn’t recognise.

“No, this one’s on me,” Katie says, ducking her chin to her chest again briefly to sigh. She looks over at Clint’s tense back with a pained expression. “I’ll come back when Agent Asshole has carefully repacked his baggage where it can’t be aired.”

Steve rather thinks it’s incredibly unfair of her to insult Clint when he can’t even hear her to defend himself, but then again, he also thinks that’s exactly why Clint turned away in the first place, so he doesn’t say anything.

Katie leans down to Lucky, scrubbing at his floppy ears and kissing his snout, before pushing him towards the kitchen. They watch as Lucky gladly trots over to Clint, headbutting the backs of his knees and stretching up to accept a pat from Clint’s hand, snuffling into his palm.

For a moment, it seems as if she’s just going to leave it there.

She scoops up a backpack from beside the couch, then a folded-up contraption that Steve realises is a bow similar to the ones Clint carries when he’s having to travel light, and makes for the front door with her hair dropping over his shoulders in a defeated slump.

She’s barely a step and a half away from the door when she turns on her heel and gives Steve a disturbingly intrusive look, like she’s just thought of something of grave importance. For the first time, she looks something close to shamed.

“I guess I should make sure you’re all caught up on the love is love train,” she says, and Steve doesn’t think he’s imagining the faintest trace of pink in her cheeks as she points her slightly snubbed nose defiantly into the air.

Steve frowns, unsure what she means by that. Katie grimaces, glancing back over at Clint.

“I mean, you’re hardly Westborough material, but that doesn’t mean you’re not prejudiced.”

Steve doesn’t laugh, but it’s an absurdly close thing.

Unbidden, not so much forgotten as waylaid in place of bigger, harder weights to bear, there sits amidst Steve’s memories the look on Bucky’s face, Christmas Eve, 1943. _Got stuck – got left – rifle –_ he had managed to wheeze through, before Steve clapped him on the shoulder and told him he really should be more careful with his firearms.

Not to mention the downturn of Gabe’s eyes for the next three days, like if he looked up, it would be to find himself in front of a firing squad.

 “Oh,” Steve says, now, and thankfully he doesn’t laugh, a combination of resentment and sadness at her postured statement gnawing on his raised hackles. “You’re – it’s fine. I’m not. Prejudiced, that is.”

“Good,” Katie replies, and doesn’t wince at the loud, surprisingly well-timed smack of another pan hitting the stove, but she does side-eye Clint none too kindly. “Glad to hear it.”

She tips Steve a little salute with two fingers, then waggles her fingers, hoisting her bag onto one shoulder. She’s half a turn away when she changes her mind a second time.

“Hey, look, El Capitano,” she says, and there, right there again, is some identical look on her face, or rhythm in her voice, to match Clint’s. “I was just messing around. I’m – glad. He could use a friend.”

Steve figures that’s the best version of an apology he can expect, and honestly, it’s probably more than a lot of other people Steve’s met would give, so he doesn’t push his luck. He just nods at the woman, and forces a gracious grin on top of his frown.

“He’s got a few,” he retorts, which, come to think of it, sounds a bit more threatening than he meant it to.

If Katie gets it, she doesn’t back down from the little bulldog display. Instead, it makes her smile deeply, indulgently.

“I’m Kate,” she says, and Steve recalibrates that in his head. Her pale hair and her pointy elbows and her sharp cheekbones and her cocked hip, _Kate._

“I’m Steve,” he replies automatically.

Kate snorts, eyes flashing in a sinful display of amusement.

“Yeah, I got that much,” she drawls with a tilt of her head. “Take care of him, Steve.”

Steve tries that one on for size. It doesn’t sit right, not in the slightest.

“He doesn’t need taking care of, but I will,” he agrees.

“Ha!” Kate cries, another of those bright and bubbly sounds, sharp like blades and sour champagne. “You’ve clearly never seen him try to change a lightbulb.”

This time, she gets all the way to the door, is already halfway out as she throws casually over her shoulder one final grin and a loose,

“See you around, Stevie.”

Steve feels a fist close briefly around his lungs at the complacent name, flinching when the door slams shut.

He tries to steal back his bearings, but they’re intangible, like the thoughts swimming in fragments around his head. He watches the door, half-expecting Kate to waltz back in, half-hoping Natasha will in her place, but it stays firmly shut for four long, shaky minutes.

Steve is pulled back into the present by a wet, cold nose nudging at his hand.

He grins down at Lucky, who sits back on his hind legs once he has Steve’s attention, smiling up at him with his tongue lolling out, whining.

“Good boy,” Steve says, smoothing his hand down over Lucky’s ears, rubbing them between his fingers.

Lucky wiggles madly in approval, and promptly flops down to show his belly, which Steve gives a rub, too. He’s not a loud dog, and Steve does wonder if that’s how he’s always been, or if Clint trained him that way, or if perhaps it’s some other lasting memento of his previous owners, along with the scar that cuts cruelly over one of his eyes.

Once he’s had his fill of affection, Lucky rolls back over and scrambles away to the window, where he gets his forepaws up on the window ledge, to he can stare down the pigeons that sit on the line that runs parallel to the side of the building, looking awfully pleased with himself and his sentry skills.

Steve looks across the room at Clint.

He’s still in the kitchen area, washing potatoes far more thoroughly than Steve has ever seen him do _anything_ in the kitchen before, his entire body a single long, scrambled line of tension. Steve can practically see his thoughts scribbled in neon signs over his head, and he wants nothing more than to shove them away, but to his utmost frustration and, yes, maybe shame, he has no idea what he could say to make that happen.

 _You know that’s a two-way street, don’t you, Hawk?_ Steve had said to him, once, and Steve had meant it, and so had Hawkeye, but that doesn’t mean they actually spend much time _talking_ to each other about this stuff.

It’s more just, well. It’s nice to have the option, isn’t it? It’s nice to know he _could_ talk to Clint, if he wanted to, and that the man would listen. Doesn’t mean he’s actually going to.

Still, he has to try. Because Clint’s his _friend,_ and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let something stupid like a misunderstanding or a bout of ill-timed teasing get in the way of that. And in any case, Steve finds he really can’t bear the thought that Clint actually believes Steve is any kind of prejudiced.

There’s no way Clint won’t notice his approach, but he moves cautiously all the same. Waits until he’s standing a safe two metres away, right up against the worktop, over the steam of some kind of chilli. He inhales deeply, smells nutmeg and tomato and the earthy fat of beef mince, then taps Clint on the shoulder three times with three fingers.

Clint stops washing the potatoes, cold water splashing over his hands and hitting the edges of the sink.

His eyes are very far away, even when they flick sideways, first to Steve’s hands, loosely hanging by his sides, then to his face, and the easy, careful distance between them. There’s nothing but anticipation in his perfectly held expression.

“Can I help?” Steve asks, once Clint is looking at his face again.

Clint’s gaze darts around the kitchen, resting briefly further away, on Lucky, and he almost smiles.

“Salad needs chopping,” he tells Steve, swallowing around a cough.

It’s not often he speaks without his hearing aids in, but Steve has come to recognise the very faint strain on his consonants, a natural over-articulation that he hadn’t noticed the first few times he heard it.

Steve doesn’t say anything more. Just gets to work with pulling things from the fridge, not glancing over at his host more than he has to as he slices up some tomatoes on a wooden chopping board, dropping them chunk by chunk into a large bowl. He still feels tired, but the sleep has taken the edge off.

By the time he’s done with the tomatoes and the peppers and is moving onto the lettuce, when he looks back at Clint it’s to see that he’s got his hearing aids back in. Still Steve doesn’t say anything. He washes the leaves and mixes them into the bowl.

The incredibly clean potatoes are almost boiled by the time Clint finally speaks.

Steve has wordlessly taken over the chilli, which mostly involves stirring and tasting for seasoning, both things he is more than fine with handling, and doesn’t even notice he’s started humming under his breath until Clint’s voice follows the current, the easy drift of _Stormy Weather_ that has them both snickering into the whuffing silence of Lucky’s snoring.

Just as Steve reaches into a cupboard for two plates, Clint says with an unfamiliar, unsure tone,

“Katie’s a stray.”

Steve pauses, plates in hand, looking at his friend. His friend, who’s wearing his resolution on his sleeve where his heart should be, and it sort of hurts, but it’s less than surprising.

“Same as Lucky,” Clint continues. There’s a code in there that Steve might struggle to crack, except for the fact it’s a language he already speaks. “She’s not –”

“I get it,” Steve says, smiling. “She’s your people.”

Clint relaxes. It’s a visible, visceral thing, the way his broad shoulders loosen, and the pale skies of his eyes seem to clear of those stormy weather clouds.

“Yeah,” he replies. “She’s my people.”

They set the table, and serve the food, and eat in companionable less-than-silence. They talk about the Stark Expo that starts tomorrow, and theorise just exactly how long Tony will make Bruce hang around, and how many people Natasha will pretend to be, and how many offers Thor will get for an hour’s lab time.

When Steve suggests they sneak in as potential buyers on the guest list, just for the look on Tony’s face when he sees them, Clint laughs, and some of the resolution on that sleeve of his rubs away, letting slip an inch or more of his heart.

Steve thinks, maybe, just maybe, he’s Clint’s people, too.

*

“And the Hawk?” Thor says, months later, _years_ later.

He holds Stormbreaker between both hands. His eyes are mismatched, and the world about them has been cleaved in two. He stares at the growing list compiled on the holographic desktop they are adding to, name by stuttered name, and he says, “Do we know if he has survived?”

New York is a cold and lonely place, already, four days after they lost the unlosable.

Natasha has her back to them. Steve sees her stiffen, feels her presence withdraw in a moment. Thor looks between them, and to Rhodey, who’s sitting at one of the nearby tables, and to Pepper, who’s only been here for a few hours but already has their entire baseless operation running smoother than they’d managed in twice that time.

Steve opens his mouth but the words don’t come. They never do.

“Hawkeye died seventeen months ago.”

It’s Natasha that says it. Flat as a frozen lake, with her arms crossed over her chest and her hair tucked back behind her ears and the thin chain of a familiar necklace glinting around her neck.

Thor looks surprised, then angry, then grief-stricken.

It’s a repeat cycle, these things. They’ve already played it a thousand times in the past four days.

“What happened?” he asks, low, thunderous, though there is no crackle of lightning.

He’s looking at Steve. So is Rhodey, and Pepper, and Steve wants to reject their attention, wants to tell them to look away, tell them to put their questions and their answers and their unspoken accusations elsewhere, their inescapable blame _elsewhere._ He can’t. There’s nowhere else for it to go.

“I made a mistake,” he says, which is true, but it’s not _right._ That’s not how he died, it’s not even why he died.

Natasha bows her head.

Stays there, like that, perfect and still, until Thor’s hand finds her shoulder.

“I am sorry.”

His murmur rumbles through the room, and Steve violently fights back the vicious envy burning up his throat at Thor’s gentle offering to her, because she deserves it, she does, and Steve? He doesn’t. He doesn’t deserve Thor’s sympathies, not anybody’s, not in the slightest. That’s not part of the deal, not when you get too cocky and you get too complacent, not when you get one of your teammates killed.

He made a mistake.

*

Steve dreams, and the dreams wake him up, and when they do, he goes to the gym, to fight back the phantoms that live inside his mind.

Except, until, he doesn’t.

*

“JARVIS, is anyone in the gym downstairs?” he asks, breathless, sitting upright on his mattress with his heart in his throat.

At least he hasn’t fallen off the bed this time.

He wipes at his temples and the corners of his mouth, tries to rid his eyes and ears of the biting ice of the Arctic Ocean.

 _“No, Captain,”_ JARVIS dutifully replies. _“However, Agent Barton is awake.”_

Steve reaches over to flick on the lamp on his bedside cabinet, casting a warm embrace of orange light about the room.

“Where?” he asks, kicking back the covers and swinging his legs to the side, cringing at the cool floor against his bare feet.

 _“In his quarters,”_ JARVIS replies.

Steve frowns up at the ceiling, wishing not for the first time he just had somewhere to _look_ when talking to the AI. It’s inherently disorienting, speaking out loud to nothing, however easily Tony does it. In any case, Steve’s pretty sure Tony was doing it even before he had JARVIS to answer.

On the one hand, Clint isn’t in any of the tower’s many communal spaces, which Steve would generally assume meant he didn’t want to be disturbed. On the other, JARVIS has never before offered up information without some kind of instruction or reason.

Swallowing down the sick feeling in his throat, Steve looks down at his hands. They’re steady, resting on his legs, and when he curls them deliberately into fists the knuckles whiten under his skin. He could go to the gym. He _should_ go to the gym. Or he could get over whatever invisible barrier it is his mind seems to have built between himself and his sketchbooks, which have been left untouched for weeks all over his apartment.

There’s nothing to _draw,_ is the thing. Or rather, nothing he can commit to.

There is no pencil in his possession that can accurately mark down the ferocity of his thoughts, nor explain the haze of white-blue-frost that comes crawling into bed alongside his dreams, night after night. These hands, they are weapons, and sometimes it feels like they don’t deserve the gentle curl of a pencil, could not possibly create something that isn’t strikingly violent.

“Why did you tell me Clint was awake, JARVIS?” Steve asks, his eyes on his hands as he stretches his fingers out, unblemished, strong, lethal.

_“Agent Barton enquired about you a short while ago. At the time you displayed no signs of waking. It seemed prudent to mention.”_

Steve glances at the little clock sitting beside his bedside lamp. Two-twenty-six.

He should go to the gym.

 _(Hey Cap,_ he’ll say, later, much later, rusty and sunken, and he’ll look like all those bad dreams they never talked about.)

Twenty-five minutes later, Steve is knocking three times on the door that leads to Hawkeye’s private quarters, wearing a soft pair of jeans and a heavy blue sweatshirt.

Clint opens the door after a few moments, dressed for the training room but looking more like he’s just rolled off the couch. His hair is rumpled and he blinks dazedly at Steve’s sweatshirt a few times, as if trying to figure out the senseless pattern of it.

“Steve,” he says after a moment, lifting one hand to his hearing aids. “Hey. What time is it?”

Feeling more than a little awkward standing outside in the corridor, Steve searches Clint’s face for some trace of annoyance or anger, finding only confusion.

“JARVIS told me you were awake. Sorry, I didn’t –”

“Hey, no, don’t worry,” Clint says, stepping back and waving him through the doorway. “Come on in. Wouldn’t have answered if I didn’t want company.”

Clint’s quarters, while a little less military than Steve’s, have a distinctly unlived-in quality to them. There are only trace tokens of personality about the living room; the furniture has a very _Pepper_ feel to them, from the plush cosy couch to the wide flatscreen on the wall.

Steve goes directly to the middle of the room, drawn to the couch purely by its central placement, and stands in front of the TV, feeling abruptly out of his depth.

“Want some coffee?” Clint asks, gesturing to the cup and pot sitting on one of the side tables next to the couch.

Steve’s mouth twists in a mocking grin.

“No, Clint,” he says, falsely stern, wondering yet again how Barton sleeps at _all,_ with so much caffeine running through his veins. “I don’t want coffee.”

Clint easily reads his tone, shrugging shamelessly and laughing.

“Don’t get judgy,” he says with exaggerated hurt. “It wouldn’t even affect you! Your super-duper soldier blood will flush in out in a heartbeat anyway so you can – Steve –”

Steve pulls in a horrible, stuttering breath. Suddenly, painfully, the Arctic Ocean is burning in the back of his throat.

“Aww, shit,” Clint says, darting forwards and away, hovering like he wants to reach out as Steve curls into himself, just a little, just to try ridding the salt from his ears. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” Steve tries to scoff, but it only comes out as an apology of his own, one that rattles out of his mouth as he tries to push down the claws of something a lot like fright in his throat. “I don’t know – I’m just –”

“Woah, Steve, it’s OK,” Clint says firmly, taking a decided step closer, so that he’s within touching distance. Not reaching out, just standing there, easily, comfortably, unafraid of the way Steve’s fists are punch-ready by his sides. “Shit, Cap. Must’ve been some dream.”

Steve recoils, closes his eyes briefly but there’s just the sting of the sea behind his lids so he has to open them, has to look at Clint’s crumpled worry and big, anxious eyes.

“It wasn’t –” Steve stop starts, tries again on an exhale. “I think I woke up, sometimes.”

It tumbles out of him against his will, he’s never said that before, not to anyone, not to anybody, not even to his bathroom mirror but it’s there all the time, every second of every day it sits in the back of his mind, waiting, waiting to grab him, to drown him, to –

“In the dream?” Clint asks and Steve shakes, shakes his head, and his fists follow suit.

“In the ice.”

Clint rarely reveals his hand without meaning to, but the dropped look of shock splattered across his expression is unbearably genuine.

Steve looks down at their feet, at his own pair of sneakers and Clint’s purple and green striped socks. He hears Clint clear his throat, sees his weight shift as he tries and fails to move in any direction.

“Holy crap,” is what eventually bursts out of Clint, and Steve makes a sound that might once have been laughter, twisted and thorny, and when he looks up Clint’s eyes are very wide and his cheeks are very red. “Umm, wow. OK. That’s. That’s awful.”

There’s something so incredibly heartening in that understatement, something very soothing and true. Clint breathes sharply through his nose, visibly struggling to conjure fresh words.

“Yeah,” Steve says in whispered agreement.

Clint casts about his living room, looking for what, Steve doesn’t know, returning his gaze to Steve with a forceful, resolved concern.

“I mean, Steve. Jesus. Have you – I mean – are you –”

 _No, no, no_ are all the answers Steve has to those questions, and Clint must know it, because he doesn’t bother finishing any of them. His mouth hangs open and his brow creases in the middle.

“I don’t remember, exactly,” Steve says, hesitant and self-conscious, tucking his elbows towards his sides and rolling his words inside his mouth. “I don’t. It might just be my imagination. Right? Just my brain telling me they’re memories but it’s just, you know, making stuff up.”

Which is the crux of it, really.

Because maybe they’re just _dreams._ Dreams he can’t rid himself of, dreams his messed-up mind keeps painting and playing out in high definition for his heart to run riot over, destroying him in increments, until he wonders if perhaps just smelling the sea air is one day going to throw him into a tailspin.

Clint looks, if anything, more horrified than before.

“OK, first thing, don’t say that like it’s any better, Rogers,” he says in that funny, parent voice of his that makes Steve’s heart hurt for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. “Whether you’re remembering waking up frozen in twenty feet of ice or your brain is throwing make believe at you, that is still way, way beyond messed up. You are allowed to be as freaked out as you need. Ok?”

This is, quite frankly, more than Steve had expected from Clint, which in turn makes him feel bad, because why _wouldn’t_ Clint take him seriously? He’s been there, time and again for Steve, asking very little and offering a plethora, and Steve knows where that comes from. A completely non-enhanced, unaided member of a team of biologically enhanced, technologically aided supers? It’s enough to give anybody a complex.

Instinct, Steve is only just realising, has pushed him here, to Clint. Because his instincts knew even when his brain didn’t, that this was where he could come to, _who_ he could come to.

Instinct, and perhaps also JARVIS.

Clint’s still wearing a crossly worrisome frown as he gives Steve a long, arrow angle look.

“Is that what – do you need to freak out?” he offers, his arms swinging around a little as if to gesture his apartment as prime freak-out-space. “Or, punch some stuff? Or have like, a blanket? Or a hug?”

_Fuck._

All at once, having not even considered such a desire for longer than he can remember, Steve absolutely wants nothing more, has never wanted  _anything_ more, than he wants a hug right now.

“I…” he says, but the request can’t follow, won’t follow.

His hands are still half-fists, he can feel the fight in them, and too easily, far easier than the image of hugging Clint, comes the image of maybe punching him in the face, and it makes him withdraw. He doesn’t think anybody’s really hugged him since the twentieth century.

Clint. Clint, with his sharpshooter’s eyes, who sees things perfectly from a distance, who so often struggles with the things up close. He sees it.

Of course he sees it.

One moment, Clint’s looking at him with a terrible, wonderful shade of compassion, and the next, he’s hugging Steve something fierce.

Steve starts as Clint’s arms, broad and strong and warm, encase him, and somewhere between the extra body heat and the inexplicably desperate feeling of trapped-protected-safe, the icy scrape of the Arctic Ocean seems to seep out of the exposed nerve ending of Steve’s omnipresent dream, which maybe isn’t a dream at all.

After a few seconds, during which he is surprised to realise Clint has no intention of letting go any time soon, Steve shifts his weight.

Clint laughs, just once, the sound filling the space between them, a promise, an oath.

Cautiously, Steve puts his hand on Clint’s neck, lightly enough to be shaken off, close enough to feel the shift of his spinal cord under his palm and between his fingers and thumb. The magnitude of his trust feels like a chasm stretched out beneath them, and the freefall of accepting it leaves Steve breathless.

It would take nothing, absolutely nothing, for Steve to break Clint’s neck like this. One squeeze, and he would drop like a torn sack of barley.

“You’re really bad at hugging, Cap,” Clint says, and Steve laughs, deep in his chest.

He wraps his arms tighter around Clint in response, and Clint chuckles.

“There you go,” he says encouragingly, the way he sometimes talks to his arrows when he forgets he’s not alone. “That’s the one.”

Steve feels abruptly heavy, lead bones and rusted joints. Clint smells of cotton and sweat and shampoo; he's smaller than Steve, but not by all that much, and Steve, he's gotten used to the space in the world he takes up thanks to Erskine's formula, but that doesn't mean he's ever going to forget what it felt like to be much, much smaller. He’s exhausted, and he doesn’t want to move at all, doesn’t know if he could.

Until, that is, Clint chuckles to himself again, charmless asshole that he is.

“How long do you think we can make it before this gets super awkward?” he asks, and Steve doesn’t fight the grin that splits his face.

He extracts himself from the hug slowly, reluctantly.

“There,” he says in a false reprimand. “Right there. Now it’s awkward.”

Clint lets him go, one hand slapping down on his shoulder.

“Nah, man,” he dismisses with an easy smirk, all soft edges but for his eyes, which haven’t dulled at all, searching Steve for some unspoken sign. “We’re good.”

Steve swallows, and he wants to offer a similar sentiment, but his own gratitude gets in the way and he just nods silently.

Clint’s head tilts to the side, thoughtful and more than a little upset, despite his smile.

“Look, Steve,” he says, and he still hasn’t let go of Steve’s shoulder but that’s fine, because Steve doesn’t think he’s ready to lose that small weight of human contact yet. “I know you’re carrying some heavy shit.  And I am probably not your best or first choice for helping you deal. I can’t even comprehend what you have gone through. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell me, or that I won’t listen. You know?”

Steve has really got to stop underestimating his teammates.

He nods at Clint, has no words at all in any language for how sorry he is that in that moment, he’s so fucking far away, he’s miles and years away, standing next to James Buchanan Barnes, promising him a world he’ll fail to deliver.

He misses Bucky like he misses everything else; wholly, fiercely and with a silent, despairing rage that wreaks havoc upon his soul.

Maybe Clint can tell, maybe he sees it, because he finally lets go of Steve, then. Pulls back, as if he knows Steve is wanting for something he can’t give.

When he looks away towards the wall, looks at something Steve can’t see, Steve sees in his face some of that silent, despairing rage reflected back at him, and he hates whatever it is that’s put that look on that kind face. He knows he’s not the only Avenger to know what it feels like to get buried by the burden of loss.

Hell, there isn’t an Avenger that doesn’t know that feeling.

Clint’s got that silent, despairing rage of his own, and whether or not Steve ever takes up the offer to burden him with more, he knows Clint means it when he says that he’d listen.

“You know that’s a two-way street, don’t you, Hawk?” Steve says.

Clint blinks twice rapidly, looking back at him. He looks, abruptly, more fragile than he’s ever looked before, that Steve has seen him. He nods, and seems to gather himself together, realign some fragments of his mask, but it’s a weak effort at best. He’s not trying to hide, and it’s another of those little gut-punches, Steve’s relief and surprise.

A little smirk plays on Clint’s face.

“And that’s still definitely a no on the coffee?”

Steve snorts, gently, and rolls his eyes visibly.

“I could drink some coffee,” he says.

It’s mostly true, and ill-voiced or not, Clint was right, it’s hardly going to keep him up.

Clint nods approvingly, sets about scooping up the pot and cup and heading for his kitchen at the south corner of the apartment.

“Great,” he says, bright and cool. “Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

Steve, letting out a long audible sigh, follows orders and sinks into the sofa. It’s definitely one of Pepper’s choosing, plush and rich and a lovely shade of dark purple. He lets the cushions drag him into a half-recline, leaning into one side, his body loose with comfort.

Cupping his jaw lazily in his palm, elbow on the armrest, Steve stares up at the flatscreen, which he only now realises is paused on an image of two sleeping cheetahs. They are beautiful and dusty, baking in the sunshine, and Steve takes in their every detail as he waits for Clint to return.

When he does, he’s carrying two mugs, bringing with him the smell of coffee that’s definitely too strong for someone without _super-duper soldier blood_ to be drinking at three-thirty in the morning. Steve doesn’t say as much.

Clint hands him a Pikachu mug, looking immensely pleased with himself, mumbling, “Here you go, El Capitano.”

When Steve takes it, bringing it close to his face, he can smell the scoop of chocolate Clint’s added to the coffee. He throws a knowing look at the archer, who’s smiling innocently at him, settling into the other side of the couch and snatching up the TV controller.

“Thanks, Hawkeye,” Steve says, and Clint side-eyes him, more softly than before.

“No problem, Cap,” he replies, pressing play on the cheetahs.

It’s a documentary, one that Steve’s seen before. It’s muted, but Clint brings up the volume a little, dropping the remote on the floor between them. After a moment’s glancing hesitation, Clint takes out his hearing aids, one by one, dropping them onto the side table next to him and hugging his coffee close.

Steve sinks deeper into the couch cushions, showing no outward sign of having noticed, or of knowing exactly what the display of trust entails. He sips his drink, heated to perfection, and listens to a soothing British voice talk about predators on the African continent.

Time slips away, quiet and unassuming. The documentary rolls on from the African savannah to the rainforests of South America. Steve finishes his cup, barely remembers to drop it down next to Clint’s with the remote.

Clint’s curled against the other armrest, eyes closed, breaths steady.

Steve falls asleep before daybreak, drifts and sinks where he cannot be reached.

*

He dreams, but only just.

When he wakes up, Clint’s there, with eyes that see, and know.

*

“Hey, Cap?” Clint says, later, months later, years later.

He’s staring down at his left hand, not with the nauseous horror that Steve keeps doing, but with a detached curiosity that’s almost worse than the bull bellows that had erupted from him the first time around.

“Yeah, Hawk?” Steve answers in what feels like a drain swirl, never ending dance.

There’s sweat on Clint’s brow. He’s ash grey and there are faint tremors running through him.

It’s been hours, _days,_ since Steve got to the Raft. Since they flew below the radar over the black and blue sea, shot down like a grouse to a field. Steve’s tired, tired in a way he isn’t used to, tired in a way that hurts all over. Tired of these chains and tired of this cold and tired of Clint screaming when they break past that threshold he’s maintained so well for years.

Steve’s been waiting for him to go into shock for a while, now. Since around maybe his middle finger.

But his body, for all its human frailty, is resilient, too resilient for his own good. He won’t succumb, _can’t_ succumb, and Steve’s frightened of what’s going to happen when they run out of parts of his hands.

“S’gonna be OK, y’know,” Clint says, dry and distant as a sandstorm. “Plenny ‘f robohands where we’re goin’.”

Steve tries his best to make his smile visible.

“You and Buck can get a matching set,” he suggests, and Clint makes a sound like laughter, like strangling.

He hums tunelessly, until it slowly turns into a melody, tripwire notes.

Steve made promises, and he intends to keep them, but he’s got it wrong, so very wrong. He wants to apologise, he wants to give in. He doesn’t want to hear what Clint sounds like when he cries.

*

When Steve fell in love with Margaret Carter, twenty-six thousand, seven hundred and ninety days before he buried her, it happened much the same way he always hoped it would.

Suddenly, ferociously, desperately, yearningly. She was a face, and then she was the only face; a voice, and then the only voice. He loved her the way he always hoped he’d one day to deserve to love, and he never questioned it, never betrayed that love with doubt, even when he doubted everything else.

Later, down the line but not quite at the end, Clint Barton says to Steve,

“It’s about that guy outside, right now. Who is beautiful and hurting and who actually does kind of need me, for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, or explain to you.”

He says,

“I didn’t mean for this to happen, Cap. But I’m not letting him go. It’s not an option, do you understand what I’m saying?”

And Steve, he understands, he really, really does.

How could he not?

*

Steve finds Bucky.

Steve finds him, but it’s Clint who brings him home.

*

He’s kneeling on the floor, and there’s an earthquake grinding through his shoulders. He’s got his face buried in Buck’s chest, and Buck’s arms are around him, so tight it looks painful, and even through the window, Steve can hear the mumbling of his half-spoken words.

“Jus’ a kid, Buck,” he says, and Bucky kisses the thatched crown of his head.

“Wasn’t your fault, sweetheart,” Bucky says into his hair, and when he looks up, looks out, through the foggy window and meets Steve’s eyes, there are whole galaxies in his face.

*

 _I’m retiring,_ he says.

 _I’m done,_ he says.

He says, _Maybe in a few months I’ll feel different. But right now, I need to walk away before I lose more than I can afford to._

*

 _I think I deserve something good, that’s my choice,_ Bucky snarls in a flurry of unprecedented, fatal rage, and if Steve hadn’t been too busy filling his lungs with hot air and his head with all sorts of bad ideas, he’d have realised the absolute _miracle_ of those words, those desires, those beliefs.

*

Tony Stark disappears, and then the alien ships arrive, and then they lose the fight.

When Tony stumbles out of a broken spaceship three weeks later, all bones and carbon dioxide, Steve catches him.

 “Couldn’t save ‘em,” Tony says in a rasp of sandy air, as if he still can’t quite believe it.

“Neither could I,” Steve says, and when Tony looks at him, those dark hurting eyes purpled by death’s looming fist, he knows for the space of two battered heartbeats that they are seeing the exact same, ravaged face.

*

_Hey, Cap?_

Yeah, Hawk?

_You did the right thing. Don’t – don’t be stupid now._

*

(“I lost the kid,” Tony says, and there, right there in that moment, an insidious, vindictive piece of spite that has lived inside Steve’s soul for seventeen months dies a peaceful, breathless death.)

*

Steve has these dreams, has them all the damn time.

He dreams he’s Captain America.

*

There are one thousand, six hundred and fifty-six days between the day Steve Rogers meets Clint Barton and the day Steve Rogers loses him.

*

This is what happens on day one thousand, six hundred and fifty-eight.

*

Steve comes to in pieces.

Medicine stings his nostrils and he remembers to flinch, although why, he’s not sure. He can taste oxygen, like it’s been forced down his throat, salt of the sea under his tongue. He can hear the muted hum of the world, and the breath of another person in the room.

He’s lying in a bed, propped up by at least six pillows to support his shoulders and neck and head. The lights are dimmed but widespread, and the room is shadowless.

Steve’s eyes adjust to the low, sunset warm light very slowly.

He looks to the side of the bed. To the man sitting statue stone in silent vigil, waiting; his long hair is tucked behind his ears and his eyes are drooping, pink at the rims. He’s been crying.

_Bucky._

It’s been a long time since Steve’s seen Bucky cry, if he ever did.

He can’t remember.

“Buck,” Steve says, but it comes out dogged, thick.

Bucky raises his head. There’s a half-tied sling covering up the gap where his left arm should be. His right hand is clenched in a fist on his knee.

“Hey, Stevie,” he says, watery and low, as if there’s a big sign hanging over their heads that reads _Caution: Fragile._

Steve’s not sure which of them the sign would be for, though. Maybe both of them.

He tries to remember. Tries to remember something that isn’t the feel of these hospital sheets and the tacky grease of his hair and the dry soak of Bucky’s face.

There’s a jumbled-up grinding of vowels and consonants, and a voice murmuring,

_Hey, Cap?_

He tries to remember.

“Where’s Clint?”

The question drops out of him, lands so heavy between them it’s like a lead ball falling through the ground, cracking the very air between them.

For a moment, Bucky stares at him. Before, in a matter of seconds, a fresh glaze of tears erupts into the beds of his eyelashes and his face drops to his chest, his mouth twisting clamped around his reply. He seems to shrink right in front of Steve’s eyes, seems to become less, a phantom disappearing like smoke in a breeze.

And then, Steve remembers.

“Oh,” he says, the sound scraping unwanted out of him. “I –”

But nothing comes out. No words at all, not solace or apology, not anger or grief. Just the blazing glaze of Clint’s hollow face, his last wretched breath, burning into his mind.

For a moment, he feels all the muscles in his face tighten, his eyes screwed up shut and his teeth digging into his lips, his tongue. His chin hits his chest. It shakes out of him, one loud and untameable sob, quickly packed away again into his chest, where it won’t be scooped out.

Bucky’s hand is on his arm, gripping him just below the elbow, exactly where Steve had grabbed Clint as the jet went down and he recoils, can’t bear the look of hurt that splashes over Bucky’s pale features only he can’t take it back, and he can’t explain either.

“How long?” he asks.

The question bullies its way out from between his clenched teeth.

Bucky puts his right hand over his own left hip in a fist, as if to keep from reaching out again, or perhaps simply to keep all his insides from spilling out like tears. There's a strap of familiar dark leather wrapped double around his wrist, like a weatherbeaten brace, fracing at one edge.

“You left Wakanda nine days ago.”

Nine days.

Nine days, that’s all it’s been. It’s hardly anything, it’s not _enough._ Nothing so terrible should be able to happen in nine days.

(All the worst things, they don’t really take _time._ They happen in an instant. In a moment of somebody’s choosing. They happen, sometimes, at the snap of a finger.)

“They brought you back about sixteen hours ago.”

Steve looks down at his own arms. Someone’s cleaned him up, because there’s only trace marks of grime and blood that will need a shower to scrub away. There’s precisely one hole in his arm, and it’s the one where there’s a needle currently attaching him to an IV drip.

The rest has already healed.

He’s healed.

One minute he’d been bloodied at every joint, pinned by nasty metal teeth chomping into his skin, screaming and yelling and talking, hadn’t slept since waking up from the jet crash, all those days without rest, without peace or mercy and now, he’s _healed._

He’s all healed up and Cl–

“They?” he asks, loud enough to hear the hoarse scratch of his own voice.

He struggles, briefly, to piece together some kind of order of events, but the events are pure chaos. A voice shouting, a needle in his neck, a recorded beep, a knife scraping deep across an open vulnerable face, a red and gold –

“Stark and T’Challa,” Bucky says, before any of it can find its way out of Steve’s dry, empty mouth.

Steve tries to take a deep enough inhale, but it’s as if all the oxygen in the room is evading him. His chest constricts with need, and confusion. He remembers Tony, blasting open the door. Remembers him talking but can’t for the life of him recall a word he’d said.

“Did Tony see you?” Steve asks, because it seems a hell of a lot easier a question than any of the others storing themselves up in his throat, forming a disorderly queue as they wait to demand voicing.

For a moment, it seems like Bucky isn’t going to answer. He reaches into a pocket of the sling that’s no longer a left arm, and pulls something out, which he holds in his open palm.

“Gave me these,” he says, so quietly the words almost don’t make it to Steve’s ears.

In his one remaining hand is a pair of broken hearing aids.

“Jesus,” Steve chokes, and suddenly the heels of his hands are pressed hard into his face, hiding from the sight of them.

They’re the ones Tony himself designed, years ago. Steve remembers it, remembers how smug he’d been, how he’d made sure to wait until they were all in SHIELD medical together before peacocking up, full of self-congratulatory smirks as he brandished the aids with a loud _No more shoddy back-ups required, Legol–_

Another of those sobs tries to claw its way out of him, his throat is burning with the terrible impotence of his desire to let out the loudest, deepest bellow of sound that he can muster. But he _can’t._ He can’t do that, not here, not now, not when Bucky is _right there,_ sitting right there next to Steve’s bed, where he’s probably been sitting for the past sixteen hours, waiting, just waiting.

Bucky, who’d stayed behind when Steve told him to even though he didn’t want to. Who’d nodded so certainly at Steve’s reassurances, who had said, _I love him, Steve,_ like it was easy, like it was the only important thing.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs, damp into his palms, stifling the sincerity as if it might scald them both to be let loose. “Bucky I’m so –”

“Please, don’t,” Bucky whispers.

So Steve doesn’t.

He presses his palms against his face, hard and long enough to succumb to his own despair and then drag himself back from it. He has no idea how long they sit there, how long the silence pervades the gentle quietude that they should have been sharing, where what would have been tranquil gratitude there is surely now only blame and grief.

Steve bites back down all the things he should say, all the things he needs to say, because Bucky doesn’t want to hear them, and Steve, he understands, however much he wishes he didn’t.

Eventually, he braves pulling his fingers down his cheeks, smearing away the evidence of the rogue, stinging tears that had escaped, and looks back at his friend.

Bucky’s still holding the hearing aids in his open hand. He’s staring down at them, his brow furrowed and his mouth slack, as if still confused about why he’s got them at all.

The thought comes to Steve quickly, quite suddenly. All at once and terrible.

“Natasha,” he says, and tries to withstand the guilt that breaks over his head like a cresting wave, to have not thought of her before.

Bucky blinks up at him, the hearing aids disappearing back into the sling as some ugly imitation of a smile tugs at his non-expression.

“She’s not back yet.”

 _They took my soul away from me,_ she told Steve, once, once when things were not as they are now. She told him, _So Clint gave me a piece of his._

Steve feels a creeping sense of shame, when he realises there’s a seed of relief in his heart at the thought he doesn’t have to see her yet; made worse when he wonders, in fact, whether he’ll ever see her again.

He looks down at his fingers, twisted together in his lap, unblemished, strong, lethal. Useless.

“The others?” he asks his hands.

Looking closely, he can see incredibly faint indents circling the insides of his wrists.

Nine days, and that’s what he has left. A sore throat and a handful of barely visible marks.

“Safe. Ok. Sam’s pretty banged up, but he was in here to see you earlier.”

“I need to see him,” Steve says, unexpectedly, vehemently, a crack in his vowels that makes Bucky pull back.

He glances at the door, conflicted.

“He’ll be back soon,” he says, and Steve swallows painfully, feels the lock of his jaw like a break.

Shakes his head, just the once, real slow.

“Not Sam,” he whispers.

Bucky’s eyes, wet and wounded. He recoils from Steve, tiny little shakes of his head in return.

“No, you don’t,” he says, small and insistent and livid. “You _don’t.”_

Steve reaches for the nip of the IV needle in the crook of his elbow, tries to tug away the tape holding it in place but before he can peel it back, Bucky’s hand is grabbing his fingers, squeezing them hard, hard enough for the bones beneath his skin to ache in protest.

He tries to pull away from Bucky’s grip.

“Let me go, Buck,” Steve chokes. He can feel the exhaustion of Bucky’s entire body, one long bruise of anguish; it would take nothing to force him away.

Bucky sees it in his eyes, Steve can tell. The way his brow furrows and his lower lip cuts down, the way he leans closer to Steve, his grip unyielding. For the space of a heartbeat, Steve sees the consequences of every action he might take, stretching out before him, miles of unworn road.

Bucky sees them, too. His grip softens, eases away from Steve’s crushed fingers, until he lets go entirely and they sit in silence, unblinking, undying.

Slowly, measuring every moment like the precipice of a cliff, Bucky lifts his hand. He reaches out, fingers splayed vulnerable and trusting, until his hand can slide around the back of Steve’s neck, until his palm is warm against his skin, and his forefinger and thumb are resting on either side of his spine.

Steve thinks, muted and desperate, how Bucky could maybe break his neck like this. One squeeze, and perhaps he would drop like a torn sack of barley.

He doesn’t.

Bucky pulls Steve in, reels him easily, and Steve goes, goes willingly. His face pressed against Bucky’s shoulder, his hands restless until they find purchase in the creases of his clothes, where he can grip and yank and hold.

Another sound shakes out of him, one of those wretched ones, muffled and deep as the bottom of the ocean, and the rest are pushed back down into the pit of his lungs where they can’t be heard.

They sit and they wait, until a doctor arrives, followed by a limping, bandaged Sam.

Even then, Bucky doesn’t let go.

*

Steve has this dream, sometimes. This nightmare.

He dreams he’s Captain America.

He dreams he’s Captain America, and that he’s standing in a cage of iron bars, just wide enough for him to reach out, like a crucifix, like a martyr who's run out of wood.

There’s a tiger lying gutted at his feet, and behind him, a voice calls out from the gloom. Familiar, and soft, and ever so tired.

The voice says, _“Hey, Cap?”_ but when Steve turns around, there’s nobody there.

*


End file.
